2009 seemed to be the year of new topics and trends at ShmooCon. Along with the law-heavy “They Took My Laptop!” by Tyler Pitchford, ShmooCon also featured the “Bring It On!” talk “Storming the Ivy Tower” by Sandy Clark. If any of the Shmoo gods are reading this, I’m telling you this right now: keep them coming.
Not only was Sandy’s talk excellent, it was needed. While many of us work in the professional sphere, there are just as many security professionals and hackers out there who didn’t receive degrees and don’t have a string of certifications behind their name. Does that mean that they’re any less intelligent or any less deserving of jobs? No; it simply means that, for whatever reason, they didn’t take the academic route to develop their skills.
One of these people was Sandy. Offered a full-ride scholarship at 16, she turned it down. She spent her late teens and early twenties travelling around the world, doing what most of us think we want to do during the early stages of our life. But after a time, Sandy realized that she really wanted to go back to school. The only problem was that she now felt like she couldn’t; that it was too late for her to reach her dream of getting a PhD.
After spending many years idolizing academia from afar, Sandy finally started to attend lectures at the school where she worked. Eventually, she met faculty members who encouraged her to go back to school and get her PhD.Â
But how does this apply to hackers and security professionals?
As Sandy pointed out during her talk, many of the people in attendance had never graduated from high school. She said that many of them felt like they didn’t “fit” the norm, so they dropped out to ease the discomfort of being different. Unfortunately, many of these individuals felt that because they didn’t have a “degree,” they couldn’t go on to have successful jobs in the security field. According to Sandy, that is absolutely not the case.
Sandy emphasized that whether you chose to take the academic path by going back to school, or you chose to stay sans-school and focus on getting some certifications or collaborating on a research project that will get your name out in the field, you can live out your dreams with the right tools. Just like hackers wouldn’t be able to hack without a knowledge of what they’re hacking, Sandy said that academia is similar. It can be hacked; you just need to know how.
To learn more about Sandy, or if you’d like to contact her, you can visit her bio page.
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