Personal Narrative Essay

My Early Experiences

Since I was a little girl, I’ve always liked helping people. Whenever I would role play with my friends, I would always end up trying to be a doctor or nurse and attempt to perform crazy imaginary surgeries. I’m pretty good at playing Operation too. Even as I started to grow up and gain more and more experience with life I still loved helping people. So when it came down to what exactly I wanted to do, I knew it would be something along the lines of helping people.

Growing up, I watched a lot of shows with my mom like Law and Order: SVU and Grey’s Anatomy so, solving crimes and medicine was always the first thing I thought of when it came to helping people. My mom and my godmother, best friends, both worked in hospitals and I always heard stories about their work experiences whenever they got together to hangout. It never ceased to amaze me. So, once I got to the age where what you want to do is actually important, I decided to follow in the footsteps of my family and go down the medical path. 

When I started at Old Dominion University (ODU), I was a nursing major. Because of my childhood and my experiences being around a lot of kids and wanting to help people, I had decided that I wanted to be a NICU nurse. I loved watching kids, specifically babies and helping the premature ones, like my little godsister, sounded like it would be a good fit for me. 

Issues with the HESI

At ODU the nursing students typically apply for nursing school after their sophomore year, once they take the HESI which is essentially an entrance exam. The test had many different sections for different categories including, reading comprehension, vocabulary & general knowledge, grammar, basic math, biology, anatomy & physiology, chemistry, and physics. Each section was graded separately but there was also a combined score. Many of the nursing schools in the area wanted their potential students to score over 90% but my highest was only 86%. For me the hardest part of the HESI was the anatomy & physiology section because I took that class during the year when school was virtual due to COVID. And I am the type of person that learns better in person by practicing and looking at figures. So although I passed the class I didn’t feel like I learned much. 

Once the COVID online classes had stopped, I decided to retake anatomy so I could learn it better in person. And I did. However, after taking the HESI over 3 times and paying $80 dollars for each attempt, my family and I decided that I needed to move on and try a different career path. For a while I was really sad about it but after sitting down with my parents and having a lot of conversations about it my dad suggested following in his footsteps and going for a cybersecurity or IT route and helping people that way. I agreed and ended up changing my major to cybersecurity. 

Finding Where I Want to Be

Right when I changed to my new major, since I already had all of my general education classes done, I hoped right into cybersecurity classes. Many of the first classes were introductory ones, essentially explaining information about what cybersecurity is exactly. Because of the job my dad has, working at the Joint Staff, I was already familiar with some of the things we had learned about in some of those classes. At first, I was worried that the work would be hard to understand but it was actually fairly simple as long as you continue to practice the commands you learn and different techniques of accessing data. Whenever I figured out how to complete my labs and started learning what commands do different things I got really excited.

At this point I was interested in the cybersecurity field but as far as career choices I wasn’t sure. That was until I took 3 classes during my junior year. These classes were, Digital Forensics, Cybersecurity Ethics, Cybercrime: Foundations. Digital Forensics had a lot of labs where we were tasked with trying to get information from peoples mobile devices or computers, usually to help with solving crimes. Cybersecurity Ethics has us decide how ethical views connect to specific issues or examples like the ethics behind whistleblowing and privacy. Cybercrime: Foundations went over different categories that certain cybercrimes fall under like cyberviolence, cyberdeception, cybertrespass, and cyberpornography. 

The combination of these classes reminded me of one of my favorite shows I used to watch, Criminal Minds, and a specific character Penelope Garcia, who is the team’s eyes and ears when it comes to anything on the internet. It is because of that that I decided that becoming a digital forensics is actually what I want to be. I would be able to help find information hidden on people’s devices or even help solve crimes by analysing and discovering data. In fact it even got me to take Ethical Hacking and Penetration Testing which is a really fun class. 

My Goals Now

Now that I know exactly where I want to be, I’ve been talking to my dad about ways to get a career started. He mentioned that networking is a really big way to get connections and suggested joining a group that he is in that is called the Information Systems Security Association (ISSA). They typically meet once a month and have speakers and presentations related to IT, Cybersecurity, Computer Science, and more. The group also advertises any open job positions available in the companies they work for, which I believe will really help me in finding one. Once I graduate my main goal would be to join the ISSA and get some certifications like the security +.  

Overall, I’m really excited that I found another option that I’m interested in pursuing. Not to mention it has led to some very intense but fun conversations with my dad about ethics and AI. It is also still within my passion of loving to help people so that makes me extremely happy. So, even though my goal, career wise, changed, I am still very excited for the future and I know now that there are always other options for everyone to pursue.