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As a high school senior, I can now look back at the past three years and think of all the good (and some poor) decisions I’ve made that shaped the person I am today. I will eventually discuss most of those at some point on these blogs, so you can take them as advice and make better choices yourself if you are still an underclassmen. Today I’ll start with what I think is the most impactful decision I made in high school. Of course, I have another whole year ahead, and who knows how I’ll change by the time I graduate. Maybe the “best decision” is yet to come -- I can only hope.
But as far as what’s happened until now, I can say, without a doubt, that the best decision I made was joining our high school’s Cybersecurity Club in my sophomore year. The passion and involvement I had within this club surpasses that of many other clubs and organizations I’ve been part of. The experiences I gained from the club have helped me understand what I’m passionate about. I also feel like I made the most friends in the club (In fact, Pranav, who contributed to the development of Open Source Collage back in March, is a friend whom I got to know from having been on the same team in cybersecurity competitions). The club has definitely opened the door for me to get to know more people and build connections with peers who are all passionate about the same things. While “cybersecurity club” may not be as distinguished and well known as other clubs such as debate or science olympiads (which are all universally recognized in high schools all across the board), I still think I got the most value out of it. This blog is all about finding the right group of people, and focusing on your passions. Hopefully you can also find a school club that you know you truly belong in, where you can dedicate time into learning while having fun.
I joined the club the year it was founded at my school (my sophomore year). It had two co-founders, Sydney and Brian, and it was from Sydney I first heard about the club. She later told me that they had tried to establish the club the year prior, yet faced rejection (due to some unfortunate misconception by the ASB that “cybersecurity is the same as computer science”). They then had to prove how unique the club really is, and it was finally approved the next semester. I wasn’t really part of any other clubs at the time, so I decided I would join the meetings and see what cybersecurity is all about.
Believe it or not, despite now identifying myself as a pretty “tech-savvy” person, I didn’t know anything about computers nor coding in the beginning of my sophomore year. I don’t think I was even familiar with the term “cybersecurity.” My interest back then was far from learning how computers functioned. That soon changed once I joined the club to go to meetings and learn different things myself over time.
We all know club meetings during school hours are useless. All the exciting things happen outside the school. For speech and debate, this would be debate tournaments, for Model UN, it would be Saturday conferences. With Cybersecurity Club, it was participating in CyberPatriot, a nation-wide competition in which teams are tasked to find vulnerabilities in operating systems and secure them for points. The competition took place at a local community college (location doesn’t matter as long as teams can get together and have access to the target machines) and teams would work together within a six-hour window to gain as many points. There are three operating systems to be secured (Windows, Windows Server and Linux) as well as tasks on Cisco’s Packet Tracer (computer networking). The work would be divided among team members, and each person would specialize in a single task. I read somewhere describing CyberPatriot as a “complicated open book exam”, which I think captures the experience pretty well. Even though I knew close to nothing about cybersecurity initially, there wasn’t a barrier to entry to competing, since you could always search and try to brute force things, both of which were meant to be part of the learning process. Obviously, there were certain types of vulnerabilities that I wasn’t even aware that existed, which of course meant missed points and room for improvement (which is a good thing).
The first CyberPatriot season was certainly a lot of fun, and it was indeed a great learning experience. Our team, consisting of Nathan, Pranav and I, eventually did make it to the semifinals in the end. But overall, the competition was more about getting my feet wet in cybersecurity.
Following the CyberPatriot season, the club participated in National Cyber League (NCL), a competition that is focused primarily on more broader topics in cybersecurity rather than OS hardening only, like it was with CyberPatriot. This is what’s referred to as the jeopardy CTF (Capture The Flag), a game in which the goal is to obtain a “flag” or a string of letters that proves that you found hidden data through hacking techniques. This is where I got to truly explore subfields of cybersecurity, as the challenges were nicely divided into categories, such as cryptography, password cracking, web application analysis, open source intelligence, log analysis, etc. The very best thing about it was the fact that the team could extend up to 8 members, making the collaboration work more fun and the accomplishments more satisfactory. Long Live Henry is God !
The title of this blog post suggests that joining the cybersecurity club was the single, absolute best decision I made. That’s completely true, because it influenced my future in many ways. Had I not joined the club, I would have never gotten the chance to make friends with Pranav, Nathan, Brian, Sydney, Ellie, Brad, Nicholas, and Jeffrey. I would not have taken Java programming, five IT classes, and get ITF+ certification. I would not have gotten into web development to build full stack applications like this nor would I have considered studying AP Computer Science. I wouldn’t have known what “cryptography” is and my main OS would still be Windows (: D). I would not have volunteered at SoCalCCCC, and place third in the Socal Cyber Cup team game. I wouldn’t have chosen to attend Cal Poly’s cyber camp or visit Vandenberg Space Force with Brian and Brad. Joining the club opened up so many different opportunities in technology that I’d essentially built my whole identity on for the past two years.
I think a good lesson is to take advantage of given opportunities, and to try new things every now and then. Simply joining the cybersecurity club out of curiosity one day turned out to be one of the most important, impactful decisions I had made in my life.
At this point, you may wonder whether I’m firmly determined to pursue cybersecurity in the future, and the answer to that, actually, is that I’m not. While I definitely enjoyed everything that I’ve just described, I’m more interested in studying engineering than anything. Regardless of what I do in the future, I’m sure my cybersecurity & IT experience won’t ever be worthless.
With the year left, my goal (as vice president) is to ensure other students can enjoy cybersecurity activities as much as I did and gain positive experience from it. If you are involved in a school club that you’re extremely passionate about, be sure to let me know in the comments!