The beginning is not glamorous. Jess Ramos was waiting tables at $5 per hour when she enrolled at Berry College in Georgia. She wasn't chasing data - she was chasing a math degree and a Spanish minor, which is the sort of combination that makes career counselors reach for their notes.
Then a professor named Dr. Nadeem Hamid, Chair of Mathematics and Computer Science, taught her to code. She got an A. More importantly, she got hooked. That class was the moment the career path snapped into focus: analytical work, real problems, tangible impact. She graduated with her B.S. in 2019 and kept going - straight into an MSBA at the Terry College of Business at the University of Georgia, where she also worked as a graduate assistant at $17/hour with tuition covered.
Her first data internship - at Berry College's own Enrollment Management office - gave her a taste of what the work actually looked like: a dataset of 113,000 observations, a mandate to find something useful, and the satisfaction of delivering analysis that meant something to real people. She then interned at FormFree, a FinTech startup, writing reports and assisting the Business Intelligence Manager.
FormFree hired her full-time. She went from $71,500 to Senior Data Analyst to Analytics Manager in the span of roughly two years - negotiating a 29% raise in the process. Then she left for Freddie Mac at $130,000, the kind of job that looks fantastic on paper. She stayed four months. The culture wasn't right, and she trusted that instinct enough to leave.
Crunchbase was her best corporate role by her own admission - $153,000, meaningful work, and the satisfaction of building something real. She also spent those 2.5 years building Big Data Energy on the side, one LinkedIn post at a time. The post that changed everything? A casual update about working from bed at 10 PM. IBM and SAP saw it. Both reached out. The brand, apparently, had found its audience before she had finished naming it.
The firing was not clean. After two and a half years at Crunchbase without a raise or a promotion, the company let her go. She later shared publicly that management had grown increasingly uneasy with her growing social media profile - at that point, 400,000+ followers. The concern, as she understood it: her public presence was becoming a perceived liability. She describes being "way happier and doing much better" since.
The post-Crunchbase version of Jess Ramos is the one that matters most. In 2023, she formalized Big Data Energy as an LLC. She hired an intern. She brought on a video editor. She grew her Substack newsletter to 45,000+ free subscribers. She built the "Big SQL Energy" course series. She landed brand partnerships with IBM, AWS, Snowflake, Atlassian, Adobe, Lyft, Notion, the NFL, and Claude (Anthropic's AI). LinkedIn came calling with an invitation to teach on its Learning platform - her SQL course now has 50,000+ students. The platform also named her a Top Voice in Data and AI, an invitation-only designation.
What she built is not a personal brand in the influencer sense - it's an educational media company with a clear point of view. Big Data Energy exists to help individual contributors in data build community, develop confidence, and receive education delivered with integrity. The "integrity" part is load-bearing: she openly admits to Googling syntax. She talks about using ChatGPT. She says things that other educators won't, because she built her audience on transparency and has no incentive to stop.
Her YouTube setup is a DJI Osmo Pocket 3 with a DJI wireless mic. Her recommended reading is "Weapons of Math Destruction" by Cathy O'Neil. Her GitHub repos include a Random Forest loan prediction app, a SaaS product funnel analysis (72 stars), and a K-means clustering study of nonprofit donor demographics. She is, in the best sense of the phrase, a practitioner who teaches - not a teacher who once practiced.