Recent: Accepted to Carnegie Mellon
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On the 7th of February, I received a message from the INI at Carnegie Mellon: I had been accepted for the MSIS program. Of course I’d accept it. This is a pretty big deal! Carnegie Mellon is among the best universities for Computer-Science-related topics like AI and Systems. However, the MSIS program focuses on Cybersecurity, and I intend to pursue the Cyber Forensics and Incident Response (CyFIR) program.
I have made the decision to shift my focus to Cybersecurity because of my months-long job search. I have applied to hundreds of jobs since I graduated from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, many involving software engineering or information technology roles. However, there was one that interested me the most because of the content of the work.
Part of one of the many application processes I had gone through involved solving several problems using reverse engineering and cyberforensics, from combing through network packets to taking apart a process dump to undo some encryption performed on a small amount of data. As I had solved many of those challenges, I had the opportunity to interview at their Chicago office and meet the staff there. Long story short, I did not get a position at the company, but I did get inspired to pivot my focus to cybersecurity.
This wasn’t the first time I had been introduced to networking or cryptography, nor was I unfamiliar with system-level concepts — while I studied for my Bachelor’s degree at UMass, I had taken an introductory class in computer and network security and a class about computer networking fundamentals. The latter involved the use of Wireshark, a utility for sniffing and dissecting network packets and packet dunps. However, this experience was the first time I had used any reverse engineering tools — of which I had selected Ghidra. I quickly learned that my experience in writing software was easily generalizable to reverse engineering that software.
My experiences searching for work have shown...
Migration to Hugo
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A few weeks ago, I decided to invest some time into improving my website. This was a promise I made myself numerous times in the past – without much success – since I believed that it would be useful for me to have this as a sort of portfolio or resume for people to look at. However, due to academic workloads leading up to my recent graduation, I haven’t found the time to actually do that until after my graduation. Now that I have graduated, I do not have an excuse to leave my domain unused as it had been for a while before. Thus, I decided to see what options I have to make my site.