Skills
Adaptability
In today's digital world new technologies emerge everyday. Being able to quickly adapt and learn new tools is a skill I've honed both through my personal and academic life. I moved frequently growing up which forced me to learn how to integrate into a new school or friend group. I've since taken my childhood lessons to heart and now relish in the opportunity to take on new and interesting challenges. This is reflected in my academic experience, where I frequently explored new sub-fields such as game-development, web-development, and more. I've since settled into cybersecurity, in part because it is relevant to nearly all other areas and has allowed me to explore areas such as networking and assembly level programming.
Critical Thinking
Critical thinking has been a stable of my education in computer science at UF. Programming can often be thought of as an elaborate logic puzzle. Many of the projects I have completed through my course work, such as developing path finding algorithms, calculating the stock market success of United States Senators, and more have demanded intense thought in order to achieve functionality. Beyond programming, my efforts in cybersecurity have demanded a different version of critical thinking. Cybersecurity engagements, whether penetration testing ("ethical hacking"), or malware analysis, often require outside the box thinking to identify elusive vulnerabilities. Overall, my liberal arts education has prepared me well to take on these kinds of challenges and procedurally work my way through problems that initially seem unsolvable.
Communication
Computer scientists are often stereotyped as having poor communication skills, however that couldn't be farther from the truth for myself. During my time working as a cybersecurity analyst with ISG, I authored several articles that were published on the companies website. In addition, in cybersecurity it is incredibly important to explain vulnerabilities and the need for hardening to those that are less technologically savvy. Outside of my major, I have also made an effort to engage in several discussion based classes on novel fields to me such as sociology and psychology. I pride myself on being able to effectively summarize ideas and get my point across whether it is through written or oral means.