Ten years old. That was the age when I was introduced to what would become life-lasting interests. Starting out and progressing well with guitar lessons while also tinkering with my newly gifted desktop pc. Little did I know at the time these acts would later influence my life up and to this point.

I took over 5 years of private music lessons before turning to self-taught lessons. Before the spring of 2015, I had received my acceptance letter to the University of Guelph to obtain a Bachelor of Arts in Music Performance. Fastforward five years later and it the spring of 2020. I additionally acquired a minor in psychology before graduating as I had interest/plans to pursue music therapy at the time! While we were all experiencing the turmoil of covid, I was looking for fulfilling work.
I began to teach private music lessons out of the house as a side income in addition to my grocery store department manager position. Within a few weeks I had grown enamoured with educating and conversing with people of all sorts of ages, backgrounds, and ethnicities, and by September of 2020 I began running my own music lessons business. In addition to my own private work, I began to do contracted work with local music schools. One year later, September of 2021, I had resigned from my dept. manager position and went full-time teaching music. From then until now I have experienced some of the most informative and crucial years to my personal development.

In 2023, I was in a position where I was looking to attend Teacher's College. Before I began my two-year degree, I decided to do go backpacking through Europe as it was something on my bucket list I had always hoped to do. 5 weeks before leaving for the trip, unbeknownst to me at the time, I became the target of a bank account breach where the threat actor had withdrawn/etransfered four-digit dollar amounts within the span of a half-hour window. I was in shock. I was angry. But most of all, I had this looming feeling of being vulnerable. As if the safeties I had built had been completely compromised without knowing to which extent.
After eventually resolving the issue before leaving for Europe, I couldn't help but wonder just how someone had breached my privacy. My father is a near thirty-year veteran in the cybersecurity industry so I have been surrounded by the concepts and jargon for most of my memory (it also helped I have always maintained an interest in technology!) I guess you can argue things came together at the right time, but it was at this moment I began investing my personal free time to researching into the subject matter.

Since the beginning of 2024, I have been steadily studying, practicing, researching, and achieving:

• Networking Concepts and Princples
• Understanding the IoT environment
• Worked with networking tools such as Wireshark and nmap
• My Google Cybersecurity Certification
• Becoming an official ISC2 member

And as we enter the new year, I aim to continue expanding upon my skillsets by:

• Pursuing my CompTIA Security+ Certification (in progress)
• Continuing to develop my personal projects that aim to teach core IT principles
• Working on TryHackMe/HackTheLab modules
• Building and maintaining a VLAN for personal training and testing
• Further refining my programming skillset
• Gain more hands-on experience with industry-standard tools

I am to absorb as much information as I can over the coming years. Similar to the practice of music performance, the field is constantly innovating. Staying informed and up-to-date on important topics will only prove to be beneficial.