Capstone Reflection
Ahmed Kargbo
IDS 493
Dr. Mize
Capstone Reflection
Introduction
My experience at the Old Dominion School of Cybersecurity has been nothing short of amazing. Over the years I have learned and mastered the necessary skills required in my discipline, made many new connections, learned a lot about myself, and grew not just as a professional but also as a person. During my time here, I have learned and picked up many new skills, both technical, and soft. CYSE250, Basic Programming and Networking has aided my ability to develop and strengthen my technical skills. This class was very hands-on and simulated many real-world and professional experiences in the cyber world. A specific skill from this course that is very valuable to me was learning and understanding the Python coding language and setting up a working environment. This skill is very valuable to me because it has allowed me to be comfortable working with Python which has been very useful because this foundation allowed me to successfully complete my first internship as Cybersecurity Engineer at Kryptos4 and also allowed me to work on my own personal projects. A valuable soft skill I learned during my time at Old Dominion is critical thinking. There is not just one class that enforced critical thinking but all of them. A main goal for the institution (Old Dominion) is to shape all students to be critical thinkers because this is a universal skill and must be applied everywhere regardless of discipline.
Program Reflection
The most valuable learning experiences from my time at ODU have come from me getting involved in the campus community. Our courses are here to teach us about our chosen disciplines but college is much more than just attending classes and doing schoolwork, it is very important for a student to get out of their comfort zone and get involved in the community, participate and make connections. Over the years I have been involved and remained active with a few groups such as Cyber groups, and developmental groups and these experiences have been very valuable to me. There are two learning experiences in particular that have stuck with me and that I will remember forever. The first was my involvement in ‘Developing Men of Color’ (ODU DMC), this is a developmental group that brings young men together and develops the foundation for professionalism, teaching young men how to connect and prepare for a bright professional future. The most valuable learning experience I gained from this was during the professional workshop, this was an activity where we created a Linkedin account, connected with others, developed our resumes, and also received professional headshots. Experiences like this go further than coursework.
Another valuable learning experience from my time at ODU was with my involvement with the ODU cyber group. In this group students participate in cyber challenges such as capture the flag, hackathon competitions, incident response and problem solving etc. My favorite learning experience was participating in the Commonwealth Cyber initiative Cyber Sprints event. In this event students were placed into groups and given real world cyber issues that we might face as professionals, and as a team we used the creative problem solving process to create potential solutions, evaluate them into the situation and determine how effective they would be. A unique aspect from this learning experience was that, at the end of the challenge, the hosts and speakers explained the creative problem solving process in more detail and taught us that this process is a skill that could be implemented to any issue in life and not just limited to cyber. This learning experience was valuable to me because this is the process I implemented to get my internship.
An obstacle I faced during my learning experiences was feeling behind after seeing what others had accomplished. When we work with others or connect with others, it is human nature to compare ourselves to those around us and this was a challenge I faced. My active involvement in this campus community allowed me to see what my peers are doing, how they are doing it or what they have accomplished and how they did it and in doing so, sometimes I felt behind. To address this challenge, I would simply just ask questions. If there is someone who I was impressed by, I would usually ask them questions and study them to take the necessary steps to better myself. Also, with being an athlete my whole life, I am familiar with the concept that sometimes others are just simply more talented than you but that should not affect your work ethic.This concept can applied to every field and work of life because there is always someone who is established in an area you might lacking and rather than letting it bring you down you should simply just ask questions and work together.
IDS 493 Reflection
Most think the course IDS 493 is just about your ePortfolio but to me, this class is more of a reflection course which is why it is a perfect capstone course. This class is much more than just building a website and it has allowed me to deeply reflect on my experiences at Old Dominion as my time here comes to an end. The most interesting concept I’ve practiced in this course was reflecting on my skills. This course has allowed me to carefully reflect on my skills and what they really mean, and how to actually demonstrate said skills rather than just having them. With the practice of skills, this course has helped me curate my resume by correctly organizing my skills while also actively showing proof of those skills in my resume.
In my ePortfolio, I did a great job talking about my experiences and active participation here at ODU. I explained every experience in detail and provided artifacts, describing the artifact, and relating the artifact to the experience. My biggest concern with my ePortfolio was adding content such as course experiences to my site, I was worried about what information is relevant and it would affect the structure of my site. I addressed this issue by first meeting ePortfolio specialist, Layla Allen and also viewing my peers’ ePortfolio sites, specifically those in the same discipline as me. I wish I could’ve uploaded some of my artifacts in a more structured manner, I discovered that WordPress has a size limit for when uploading documents so I had to improvise and upload some of my artifacts as structured links. A course that helped prepare for this class was CYSE201, Cyber and the Social Sciences. CYSE201 gave me the foundation of how to develop my ePortfolio. We were tasked with uploading our daily class journal entries into our ePortfolio with the idea of creating a cyber diary.
Conclusion
The concept of interdisciplinary methods and theories helped me understand my coursework because it allowed for me to make connections between disciplines by applying key concepts, researching them, summarizing them, analyzing them, applying my assumptions and showing my understanding of a topic. Two consistent connections I drew through various courses were the need for a human factor in Cybersecurity and the needs for legal guidance in the field. The need for human involvement in Cybersecurity is very prevalent whether it be the need for collaboration or physical security, the human factor in Cybersecurity is very important. Secondly, the need for legal guidance is also a very much repeated concept throughout Cybersecurity. Cybersecurity isn’t just about the technical aspect, there is a need for legal guidance such as development of frameworks, organization laws, privacy & policy laws, cyber ethics etc. Given all this information, it is more important for one to be an interdisciplinary thinker in the field of Cybersecurity because Cybersecurity is a blend of multiple disciplines and requires a diverse array of skills. After my graduation I plan to enter the workforce and apply my Cybersecurity skills and positively represent my school.