Accepted to Carnegie Mellon

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 me that the two largest industries — potentially the only ones that have real positions available at all — are security and AI. I have my reasons for not selecting AI: primarily, I find the area to be duller than systems and cryptography. However, that does not mean I find the results boring. Large language models are far more advanced than they were a mere five years ago; from quirky autocorrect engines to Internet-destroying and interview-ruining text generators, they are currently changing the world, for better and for worse. I also decided that cybersecurity would yield results more aligned with my long-term goals for my career while also better utilizing the skillset I have developed over the last decade.

I also look forward to working with CERT for my CyFIR specialization.

Surely, this should lead me to write new posts for this website more often? Probably not.

More cool things to come. I’ll see if I can make an RSS feed for the old-scool nerds that stumble upon my corner of the Net.