You may be visiting this page as one of my peers from Iowa State University, maybe even a student. Or maybe you’re just trying to learn more about me. Well let’s start: I enrolled at ISU in Fall of 2019. Then… everything went downhill.
Technology
I’ve been interested in computers for as long as I can remember. My career and practical skills really started developing in late middle school and into high school, where I installed Linux on my laptop and started tinkering with everything I could find, attending cybersecurity conferences and learning as much as I could from the people I met. Cybersecurity was an interest of mine, as I believe it should be an interest of everybody’s, because I was interested not only in how systems work, but how they can be broken and made to do things they were never supposed to. To combine these interests, I spent much of my free time in high school figuring out how to use frameworks that ran backend server-side applications to gain a real understanding of how data flows throughout an application.
I picked the only real route that made sense in light of this interest: I enrolled at Iowa State University as a Software Engineer. I was able to visit ISU several years ahead of time thanks to my older brother who was already going there. There was no “shining light moment” or anything that made me really fall in love with the university, the fact was simply that I would likely need a degree to be marketable in my field of interest, and Iowa State University was a realistic vector for achieving that.
Foreshadowing: before enrolling, I was seriously considering enlisting in the U.S. Air Force. My parents convinced me to give college a try first, and I thought it was a good idea. We’ll get back to that.
University
I met a lot of good people at ISU, and I’m definitely glad I enrolled. I participated in extracurriculars relating to my interests, including participating in the ISEAGE Cyber Defense Competition and becoming an officer of the Campus Amateur Radio Club, a side hobby that I’ve found very fulfilling. I eventually became a Peer Mentor, a TA-like position that gave me experience teaching the material I’d been learning for a few years now. These experiences were invaluable, and I would have never found them elsewhere.
But the coursework was disappointing. After having just spent 4+ years doing a scaled-down version of Systems Engineering, I found the ISU Software Engineering curriculum to be embarrassingly theoretical. After all, I chose Software Engineering over Computer Science because I actually wanted to be hands-on in building the systems we interact with in everyday life while browsing the web.
To remedy this, I tried building my resume with personal projects. I started a popular Minecraft server with my roommate, I built a search engine that indexed Tor Hidden Services (definitely my proudest and most complex project that I unfortunately had to shut down due to legality concerns), I wrote tons of smaller scripts to automate daily tasks, server provisioning, and general server management/monitoring. But I found it nearly impossible to simultaneously build my practical skills while also working towards my degree as a full-time student and a part-time employee.
So I dropped out after the Spring 2021 semester to enlist in the Air Force.
Post-University Debrief
I could rant about how hard COVID-19 hit my mental health. In reality, my failure at ISU wasn’t a foregone conclusion: I could’ve worked harder and managed my time better to complete my degree. The reality was that I didn’t want to. The seclusion of the COVID-19 pandemic gave me a lot of time to think about what I was doing. I knew from the beginning that going to college wasn’t going to teach me anything, that I was just enrolling to get the little piece of paper, but I didn’t realize how difficult it would be to simultaneously develop my real skills while also getting passing grades.
So I picked my backup plan, and in January of 2021, I met with a recruiter of the U.S. Air Force and started my progression down the military path.