Shifting into High Gear: Week 3 at SecureSet Academy

CORE Graduate, Kimberly Decker, shares an authentic student perspective of her experience and growth at SecureSet Academy.

If you’re looking at SecureSet Academy as an option for cybersecurity education, checking out our website and free events is a great way to start. Both will give you a better look at our immersive education model, as well as our overall mission of securing the future. But what if you want an inside, student perspective on Academy life? What is taking an immersive really like? SecureSet Academy alumna, Kimberly Decker, is ready to give you the inside scoop. Catch up on week 1 here.

Kimberly Decker is a CORE program graduate, who documented her time at SecureSet Academy during her 20-week immersive. Kimberly’s goal was to give “an authentic student perspective of her experience and growth at SecureSet Academy.” We’ve decided to compile Kimberly’s blog posts and publish them in a series, giving you a behind the scenes look at what it’s like to take an immersive at SecureSet Academy. If you’re looking to find out what academy life looks and feels like, you’ve come to the right place.

Week 3

The beginning of week 3 came with a warning: we were going to be overwhelmed and perhaps start questioning whether we really belonged in the program. And yes, it was a challenging week. In our Systems Security class, we took a deep dive into the Linux kernel and learned how to programmatically automate the creation and management of virtual machines. Network Security covered many topics, but most notably we mastered subnetting and started an intensive lab to manually configure a network environment. We learned about basic techniques in Cryptography, used Python to decrypt ciphers, and were treated to an excellent lecture about one-time pad and stream ciphers by John Black, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Colorado.

An important lesson to emerge this week concerns how a student must leverage their personal strengths to be successful in a bootcamp-style program. I believe every student in our class this week faced a challenge to their skills as an independent learner. For example, how would we handle a situation where a lecture was given on a complicated topic, like the Linux kernel, and we did not understand the material fully at the end of class? Future SecureSet students, consider this advice! You need to be: (1) confident enough during class to ask focused questions, (2) organized enough to document your specific learning deficiencies, and (3) determined enough to advocate for yourself and seek help when needed. But most importantly, in my opinion, you must be disciplined enough to fill in the knowledge gaps on your own through independent reading and research.

In this and future articles, I would like to provide prospective SecureSet students with some guidelines for how to best prepare for the program. I hope this is a good start.

To be continued …

About the Author

Kimberly Decker graduated from the SecureSet CORE immersive as part of the Spring 2018 cohort. Before her time at the academy, Kimberly earned her Ph.D. in molecular biology at the University of Colorado. Kimberly spent years conducting scientific research, as well as working in the software industry. Kimberly has seen several job opportunities come her way since graduating from the Academy, currently working as a security program coordinator at Ping Identity, in Denver Colorado.

If you’re interested in starting a career in cybersecurity, our CORE, HUNT and PATH immersives can get you there in less than a year. Visit secureset.com to learn more about our cybersecurity workshops, immersive programs and free cyber events.

Did you miss Week 1 and 2 of this series? Catch up on Kimberly’s story here.