I'm in the budding stage of my data science learning/career and have been applying to internships for next summer as a first year at community college. With over 100 applications, and 4 interviews total, I was just rejecting from my closest chance yet, so I have decided that I need to create my own internship. My thing has always been that I need to get my hands on real-life data, particularly data that involves transactions or money, and since I live in a small town, offering to analyze local restaurants' data seemed like the perfect opportunity to learn and potentially make some money in the future.

I live in a town with ~30,000 people. Suffice to say, there are a lot of small/medium-sized and mom-and-pops restaurants/shops in town. We have a bustling downtown scene, so there are a lot more restaurants and boutiques than one would normally think for a town of our size.

The premise that I have so far is that I would approach 1 or 2 mom-and-pops restaurants (would start with the local pizza place that I live a couple blocks from) and offer to analyze their data for general insights/trends that they could capitalize on to make more informed decisions. I would offer the first one or two consultations for free, and if I recognize that I'm knowledgeable/confident enough and they think what I do can benefit them, then we would ideally start working contractually.

I am aware that this would qualify more as DA/BI, because the extent of my ML knowledge is classification and regression. I imagine that time-series forecasting would be the modelling most relevant to restaurants, and is something that I may look into in the future.

So far, in terms of my value proposition, I have:

• Dish popularity/menu analysis
• Price adjustments based on trends
• Customer demographic analysis
• Inventory management/food waste analysis
• Discount/loyalty analysis
• Seasonality trends/insights
• Payroll/staffing analysis
• Delivery analysis (since they do pizza delivery)

I won't dive deeper into each of the points here, but what I would like from this post is:

1. Is this a good idea in the first place
2. Are there any red flags that you see in this idea/process
3. What can I do to build upon this idea
4. To what extent is this plan anything other than just building dashboards