Ironhack Cybersecurity Bootcamp
Am I a cybersecurity expert? I am not. Am I ready to be a cybersecurity expert? Yes
After 8 years working as a TV producer, in 2010 I decided to become an IT technician. I studied what in Spain is called professional training, to be more specific in IT Systems Administration, I prepared myself, I lived two years in Canada to improve the English that it takes so much to be a better IT technician, I returned to the country where I was born and I grew up, Spain, since you don’t know what … I went back to working on television.
I said 8 years… ok, after that, I have to add another 5 years as a TV producer in which I lived wonderful moments, I remembered that passion I had for computers, I remembered why I went to Vancouver and why I had been living 2 years away from my family and friends, I remembered that TV was okay but that was not my passion.
That’s how the idea of change came back to my mind, that’s how I began to explore the possibilities of the computing world, that’s how I came to the Ironhack Cybersecurity Bootcamp. I could have chosen any other school, there are many, but I chose Ironhack and I have no regrets. I do not regret it because there I have spent 3 months with great people who will be great experts in cybersecurity. Just like some day, not too far away, I will be.
I decided on cybersecurity thanks to two things. My great friend Sergio, who works in this area and my passion for deciphering problems. If we talk about cybersecurity, these problems can be deciphering why an attack has been received and what damage it has caused or why and in what way future attacks are going to happen and how they can be avoided. This I am passionate about.
Before I started on Ironhack I was faced with a question. It was an online and self-learning process and it scared me. Before starting I thought it was going to be very hard, after a couple of weeks I relaxed and I thought it was not so bad, but neither one thing nor the other. It might be easy to understand in a way, but I quickly realized that as easy as it seemed, I would need to be fully focused if I wanted to internalize and understand the immense amount of content I was dealing with.
When I talk about self-learning, I don’t mean that I was alone, with no one to turn to when in doubt, or with no one to share achievements or questions. I mean that we are the ones who have to discover everything. We are the ones who have to decide when to stop looking for the answer and ask for help, because that is what it is all about. From learning to solve, to seek, to fail and to improve. And if you feel stuck, there is always someone to help.
Every day we met for thirty minutes in the morning, we talked about the topics to be covered during the day and after the meeting our self-learning process began, sometimes alone and sometimes in groups. Days of practices, days of reading, days of searching … In the afternoon, we met again, we talked about the difficulties that we had encountered, we solved the tasks carried out and we shared the experience lived during the day, we played games to improve our social skills and we worked on our resume and on our job profile.
The e-learning platform we use at Ironhack, provided by Cybint, is packed with content for both reading and practice. Of course, the practical part is the most beautiful and the most entertaining, but it is not possible to do the labs or practices if you have not acquired the necessary knowledge first. So, I began to understand the importance of combining reading with practice. It is something very important that I have learned. I am not referring to learning to handle wireshark, for example, I mean that now I am able to learn to use any tool because I have the necessary learning techniques to be able to learn anything. This is the most important thing I have learned, more important than the knowledge acquired, is to feel prepared to acquire as much knowledge as possible.
Thus, little by little, my mentality was changing, it opened up and I understood that having teachers or help is fine, but that it is a world in which you have to know how to be alone and at the same time know how to look for information in the experience of others, understand most likely, if you have a problem, you are not the first one and probably the information you need is in a forum, blog or some other website. In addition, the most important thing is that in this learning process you have your classmates. In my case they were very important because I was able to lean on them and I was able to support them in the same way that they did with me.
So, answering the questions I started with, I am not an expert yet, the road is very long. But it is a very beautiful, very challenging path, in which I have met great people and friends and with a vital objective, to help and make the world safer. And as for the second question, YES! My name is Alberto González I am from Madrid, Spain, and I am ready.
