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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • Any Cyber professionals think I should just go all in and minor in IT or CS? Or does spreading out a bit more sound good?

    Learn programming in your own time, as there’s ample resources to learn languages common to cybersecurity (C, C++, Python, <insert instruction set here> Assembler (if reverse engineering is your thing)) outside of college/university.

    Pick something that makes you different and marketable against other cybersecurity majors. Given the way the world is going, look at political science, organised crime, or even counter-terrorism, as all of these have streams, if not rivers, into and out of cybersecurity these days.

    It provides a much broader context around your cybersecurity studies, other than just being a technical resource, by understanding why threat actors use technical means to attack, rather than just ‘how’ or ‘with what’. Minoring in something other than a technical discipline would broaden your career options to policy roles, among others.

    All that said, the minor subject(s) you choose must interest you. Japanese would be really useful to have in a cybersecurity role as it opens doors to communicate with other cybersecurity experts in their own language, including government authorities. Such skills may be desirable by the intelligence community, though I’d be wildly speculating here.

    Use your minor to help you expose niches in the discipline that can help you pivot your career, and set you apart from an ocean of dime-a-dozen cybersecurity experts who just did broad, common, technical studies.

    A word of advice: Play the long game. My advice may not immediately come to fruition when you land your first paid gig, but it will definitely become a useful playing card as your career develops, providing you maintain those skills. Hell, they don’t even need to be part of your minor subjects. Learning Japanese outside of college/university will still make you marketable.



  • I knew of someone who kind of did, depending on which way you look at it. Only for one question though…

    He noticed that the answer to a single question, was literally written on his otherwise exam-compliant calculator a few weeks before the exam, for high school math. The question often came up in practice tests. This calculator wasn’t programmable (in the sense you could store answers).

    The question?

    How many kilometres in a nautical mile? Answer: 1.852.

    He figured out that the numbers in the centre row of the calculator lined up exactly with the decimal fraction:

    7 8 9

    4 5 6

    1 2 3

    So he drew a line around the calculator pad to link those numbers up. None of the teachers picked it up, as it looked like graffiti.






  • I’m not going to lie, it takes a lot of soul searching.

    Start with what you’re passionate about. And I mean really passionate about. What could you talk to someone about for hours, or the one thing in your world that you want to make better, and it frustrates you that it isn’t.

    Each journey is highly individual, though passion is a good place to start.

    I have, without a word of a lie, watched Simon’s ‘Why’ talk at least two dozen times. I still get threads of gold from it each time I watch it, because each time I do watch it I’ve had a new experience, good or bad, that reinforces why I do what I do, and why they’ll likely have to drag me out in a body bag for me to truly leave what I do.

    I’m just that passionate about it. However, that passion took years to develop. Indeed I didn’t even know I’d ultimately land in the career I’m in today 5 years ago, which was very different to my career path then.