6/22/2020
Hello and welcome to my first blog post!
Something that has remained a constant in my life since I was young is that technology constantly advances and evolves. That statement obviously still holds truer than ever. I honestly cannot express enough how thankful I truly am to live during this timeline from the introduction of the internet to now. There are more opportunities than ever to start your own business, express yourself on how you feel about a variety of subjects, or learn new skills, all with the help of the internet.
I’m a new college graduate from Lawrence Tech University with a Bachelor’s in Computer Science.
Ever since I was in 8th grade, I always had a nagging curiosity in the back of my head when I would play video games:
“How the hell do people put a video game on the screen and how can I control the character’s movements with the tap of a button?“
Day by day my head is littered with these types of questions, always leading me down a path of exploration. As a kid, I’d hop on my laptop and spend hours searching on Google. Reading generic forum posts, Yahoo Answers (remember when they were popular?), and Stackoverflow, with people asking the same if not extremely similar questions, my eyes would scan the same word over and over again: programming. This is where my journey took off as a programmer and when I would start exploring my passion for computers.
My love for programming would soon expand during my high school years; I spent my free time making small applications that did certain tasks in an automated fashion. When college came around, it was a no brainer that I picked computer science as my degree of choice. However, there was one daunting question that I faced near the end of my junior year in college:
“What field do I want to go into as a computer programmer?”
This was a cumbersome question to answer to say the least. I mean, think about it – there is software in almost everything that we use today (cars, homes, cloud services, data processing, game design, and more), making this an overwhelming decision to have to make. The possibilities for my career path were infinite. Everything I explored was interesting, but nothing I had been exposed to so far had caught my attention to where I could see myself spending at least 40 hours a week on it and loving it.
Working at my first internship in college at an automotive supplier, a co-worker of mine introduced me to cybersecurity. He sat and explained to me the concepts of red and blue teams, penetration testers, capture the flag, and more. Ever since he mentioned it to me, I fell in love with the field and I knew this was my calling.
Coronavirus hit during my last semester in college. Although I had a job offer locked in before I graduated, with layoffs and furloughs becoming a harsh reality for so many, I was extremely worried that the company would revoke it and I would be on my own. Towards the end of March, I received an email from the company stating that my start date would be moved from the beginning of June to the end of September. Don’t get me wrong, I was extremely relieved that I didn’t lose my job. However, I was definitely wondering what the heck I was going to do for 4 months while being unemployed.
About a week after I graduated, a thought popped into my head:
“You’re not going to have an opportunity like this again; you have all the free time in the world, so make this summer count and come out at the end with something that will serve you great value.”
After countless days of deciding what I wanted to spend this valuable time on, I figured, why not just study for the OSCP and get the certification since this is my passion? Now here I am today, writing an intro blog post to the world about this journey that I am starting. Dedicating countless hours a day learning the pre-requisites of the course, I am having a blast and I will be sharing with you all everything I have learned every week.
Thanks for reading and talk soon,
Peter