Casey Franco

The Qual

At ten years old, I stole the family camcorder and began filming my friends and me seriously injuring ourselves on homemade bike ramps after school. It was shortly thereafter I committed to making entertaining media into a career.

In 2012, I enrolled in The Academy of Art San Francisco’s Communications and Media Technologies BA program. There I learned everything from advertising to After Effects and by 2016 I’d started on my way to that creative career I’d always dreamt of.

I was an event photographer, the manager of the Digital Video Department at iHeartRadio, a podcast producer, an animator, and more. I had a lucrative freelance career working with organizations like The Federal Reserve of San Francisco.

During the 2020 pandemic, I helped launch a branded podcast production company called Jam Street Media which was eventually acquired in 2021 by Amaze Media Labs where I worked as a Senior Executive Producer for a year.

The Quant

In my career, I ran into a recurring problem and that was proof. Every client I interfaced with wanted proof that my creative suggestions would work. My ongoing love interest in the field of philosophy led me into a stupor of consuming endless books on mathematics, statistics, and computer science, seeking objectivity I could apply to my, thus far, subjective career.

This path led me to the Social Technologies MA graduate program at Arizona State. There, I learned not only Data Science but Data Ethics as well.

I decided it was time for a change and took a sabbatical from my career to

1. get married to the love of my life and 2. develop a quantitative skillset.

I taught myself Python, R, SQL, Power BI, Tableau, Excel, DAX, and Machine Learning, reading dozens of books on each. I achieved a Data Science Specialization certification from IBM and a Data Analysis Professional certificate from Google and began performing analysis and building machine learning models in my spare time to test my newfound skillset.