Well, a few years ago, I would have had to tell you a long, sad tale of an undergraduate who really didn't get it when he was in school. I got HORRIBLE grades as an undergrad and didn't finish my degree program. Which program was that? Well, that was part of the problem.
I started out at Penn State in the pre-med program from the Biology side. After a single semester, I realized that biology and med school wasn't going to happen for me. I had more of an interest in computers. My favorite class that semester was CMPSCI 100 - where we wrote computer programs in Pascal on the IBM Mainframe. I thought I was so cool, because I had a dual-floppy laptop and a 2400 baud modem. I could connect to the mainframe from my dorm room and write my programs. The funny thing was that I had no idea how to set up full-screen terminal emulation, so I did it in LINE MODE! At the end of the semester, when I told my instructor, Nancy Roberts, what I had done all semester, she almost fell out of her chair! Line mode is a very low tech way of interacting with an online system.
Anyway, I figured computer science was for me. However, the computer science that I wanted to learn was high-level languages and artificial intelligence. The CMPSC department at Penn State had just started its change into a low-level operating system design department and then later merged with the computer engineering department. Well, needless to say, I lost interest in low-level design. Frankly, computer architechture is not terribly interesting to me. Well, genetics WAS interesting - kinda. Can you imagine why I didn't finish school?
So, skip ahead a few years - like 15 of them, and I find myself working in an different IT support job at the University. My boss tells me his academic story - that he was able to do his bachelor's and Ph.D. while working as a lab technician. He encourages me to return to complete my bachelor's degree. Of course, the IST building is basically next door to where I'm working, so I figure it can't be all that bad. After my dismal grades the first time around, this experience was very, very different. I was INTERESTED in the coursework. That makes a lot of difference. Well, needless to say, I got much better grades.
I started to ask myself questions - like why do IT Professionals do what they do? Why do we implement the systems we implement in the ways we implement them? Why don't we design and implement systems the RIGHT way? This started my questions that led me to graduate study.
See, I worked professionally in a graduate program in Kinesiology, so I understood from a very high level the idea of graduate education. It's not about learning more stuff, it's about learning how to ask the interesting questions - and then figuring out how to answer those questions. Heck, I can do that just as well as anyone else. IST is such an open field, that it should be easy (well, easy in a very relative way) to stake a claim on a part of the field for myself.
So, I have this interest in IT security and the implementation of systems that actually provide visbility into what is happening on the network. Have you ever looked at a snort log? Does the comptuer network administrator REALLY KNOW what computers are on the network? How is the information protected from hackers, viruses, hardware failure and natural disaster? There are lots of technical solutions out there - most driven from the "T" ot the "I-T" side of the I-T-P triangle. Very few take into account the People, and from my professional experience, it's the people that make or break this stuff. You know - you try to make it idiot-proof, but they keep making more ingenious idiots.
I started out at Penn State in the pre-med program from the Biology side. After a single semester, I realized that biology and med school wasn't going to happen for me. I had more of an interest in computers. My favorite class that semester was CMPSCI 100 - where we wrote computer programs in Pascal on the IBM Mainframe. I thought I was so cool, because I had a dual-floppy laptop and a 2400 baud modem. I could connect to the mainframe from my dorm room and write my programs. The funny thing was that I had no idea how to set up full-screen terminal emulation, so I did it in LINE MODE! At the end of the semester, when I told my instructor, Nancy Roberts, what I had done all semester, she almost fell out of her chair! Line mode is a very low tech way of interacting with an online system.
Anyway, I figured computer science was for me. However, the computer science that I wanted to learn was high-level languages and artificial intelligence. The CMPSC department at Penn State had just started its change into a low-level operating system design department and then later merged with the computer engineering department. Well, needless to say, I lost interest in low-level design. Frankly, computer architechture is not terribly interesting to me. Well, genetics WAS interesting - kinda. Can you imagine why I didn't finish school?
So, skip ahead a few years - like 15 of them, and I find myself working in an different IT support job at the University. My boss tells me his academic story - that he was able to do his bachelor's and Ph.D. while working as a lab technician. He encourages me to return to complete my bachelor's degree. Of course, the IST building is basically next door to where I'm working, so I figure it can't be all that bad. After my dismal grades the first time around, this experience was very, very different. I was INTERESTED in the coursework. That makes a lot of difference. Well, needless to say, I got much better grades.
I started to ask myself questions - like why do IT Professionals do what they do? Why do we implement the systems we implement in the ways we implement them? Why don't we design and implement systems the RIGHT way? This started my questions that led me to graduate study.
See, I worked professionally in a graduate program in Kinesiology, so I understood from a very high level the idea of graduate education. It's not about learning more stuff, it's about learning how to ask the interesting questions - and then figuring out how to answer those questions. Heck, I can do that just as well as anyone else. IST is such an open field, that it should be easy (well, easy in a very relative way) to stake a claim on a part of the field for myself.
So, I have this interest in IT security and the implementation of systems that actually provide visbility into what is happening on the network. Have you ever looked at a snort log? Does the comptuer network administrator REALLY KNOW what computers are on the network? How is the information protected from hackers, viruses, hardware failure and natural disaster? There are lots of technical solutions out there - most driven from the "T" ot the "I-T" side of the I-T-P triangle. Very few take into account the People, and from my professional experience, it's the people that make or break this stuff. You know - you try to make it idiot-proof, but they keep making more ingenious idiots.
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