Experience

Hi, I am Rebecca (Becca) Paris – creator of Porteolas, Inc.  I aspire to offer content and solutions that

• • Inspire and
  • Enable increasing the quality of your experiences

Drawing from skills I attained and honed over the last 25yr as well as new ones I pick up along my future path.

My services have spanned several industries:

• • U.S. Navy,
  • Retail,
  • Scientific research,
  • Academia and
  • Corporate risk and compliance

Through all those roles, I supported organization of data and processes to ease experiences and advance outcomes. Using

• • Resources available,
  • Knowledge I had on our current process, and
  • Awareness of pain points experienced myself and by others –

I always set off to see what solution I could develop.

• My most recent 5 years were as a Quantitative Risk Analyst on the Model Risk team with USAA’s Risk and Compliance Department.
  • As the first person to staff the now fifteen person risk team in Tampa, FL, I created a model validation portfolio governance dashboard to facilitate timely validations and performance monitoring of models in use driving business decisions.
  • Over the course of the 5 years, I progressively incorporated resources – first starting with what we had and then incorporating new as they came available.  Order flowed like this:
    • MS Excel,
    • SalesForce & Sharepoint,
    • Using Excel’s more advanced features to pull in data using API keys from SalesForce,
    • Finally, once python was allowed, I then used it to collect data that could then be displayed in Excel.
  • I kept Excel as part of my solution because it is both – a widely available and widely familiar tool. This enabled me to share a tool I had built, tested and implemented for my specific portfolio of marketing models with the other teams in my department – Banking, Enterprise, Life, and Property&Casualty. Which then eased the governance and reporting for all committees and audits across all model portfolios.
• Prior to my service with USAA, I served 4 years as the sole Research Analyst/Project Assistant staffing a five person team supporting a Dept of Ed grant.
  • Pulling from my understanding of the goals and milestones of the grant’s objective, I used MS Excel and SAS to gather and assimilate data from three disparate sources and analyze it to track and monitor progress and accomplishments.
• Upon completion of my bachelors degree in May’06, I accepted a position as a Physics Associate at Brookhaven National Laboratory in their Collider-Accelerator Dept.
  • 2 years into my time there, I began the MS Technology Systems Management (Global Operations) program at SUNY Stony Brook.
  • Using the skills I was attaining through that program, I was able to address pain points in our operations that had plagued us – namely our call-in system in place for when we experienced technological/engineering failures halting operations. The issue had been known and burdensome for quite some time – long before my joining the department.  The estimated cost for each hour of downtime was $25,000.  
  • Others had apparently tried to build solutions – going straight to programming. I approached the solution first using MS Access to build out a minimal viable product. Once that was accepted, it then had to be migrated to the MySQL server and made web enabled using PHP and HTML for use in the control room – which, upon spending my summer working to learn and set up the framework, I ultimately handed over the structured solution to our programming team.
• While pursuing my B.S. Physics, I worked full-time as an Accounting Associate for Sam’s Club.
  • I was the closing accountant on a team of 4.  To ensure, I set the opening accountant up for a smooth morning, I built in efficiencies and new processes to streamline operations.
• Upon completion of high school, I served 6 years as an Electronic Technician in the U.S. Navy.