Jason Becker

I fell in love with math and science from an early age, and received my Bachelor's in education in order to share that passion.  After a lot of frustration and soul searching, I decided to leave the field of teaching and make the switch to a career where I can invent, experiment, and push myself further.  At Groupon I got my first taste of Big Data and worked on combining customer service information with sales systems information to identify pain points and opportunities.  I have since transitioned to a media agency where we use geospatial modeling and machine learning to hone our client's advertising investments.  My current focus is expanding our data visualization capabilities and improving communication which led me to the MIDS program at Berkeley.  I've seen really effective initiatives go nowhere because they couldn't generate buy in from less technically oriented decision makers; it was immediately clear that @DataScience understands the challenges of doing great work and then generating action with it.