Cyber Security Professional & Linux Nerd
New to the world of IT, I was most recently a music educator and have taught various courses and trumpet lessons to college students for about fifteen years at three different universities: Oklahoma State University, Eastern Illinois University and most recently Texas State University. I was also a middle school teacher in the Austin (TX) Independent School District for two years immediately after graduating from the University of Texas with a bachelor’s degree in music education. I am also a veteran, having served in the U.S. Army for three years.
In September of 2022, I decided to take a leap into the unknown and announced that I would be resigning from my professorship at Texas State University to pursue a career in IT, specifically cyber security. I’ve been fascinated with technology since I was a kid, then during graduate school, a friend made me aware of the existence of an alternative operating system, GNU/Linux. Ever since my first experiments with Red Hat and Suse Linux, I’ve been hooked. At that time, you could walk into Best Buy and purchase a boxed copy of Red Hat Linux! I found my way over to Gentoo Linux and the Linux From Scratch projects, where I learned a lot about the backend of the OS in my spare time. Since the mid-2000s, I’ve installed and tinkered with well over 100 different distributions, though today I primarily use Ubuntu LTS on my production machines.
Having spent the last few years spending as much time learning about and teaching others the value of free and open source software (FOSS) as I did in my teaching job, I realized that it was finally time for a change; to embrace the profession I’ve almost felt a calling toward. I am beyond excited to get started working in this field, and I think my deep experience as both an educator and professional musician give me some unique skills in communicating with people and an appreciation of good design and high-quality work.
So, I’m officially new to the world of cyber security, but many of the concepts I’m learning are already familiar. I’ve discovered that I have a deep interest in blue team work and in helping people to navigate the sometimes scary world of technology and I love that security professionals use powerful FOSS tools such as Aircrack-ng, Hashcat, the Metasploit Framework, and Wireshark in both ethical hacking and cyber defense.