I am interested in cybersecurity as it reaffirms my problem-solving nature that first attracted me to computer science. Computer science is my first major. News of companies being hacked and my re-binging of Mr. Robot during the pandemic got me interested in cybersecurity. The segue to double majoring in both was a no-brainer. After all, writing unsafe software and even worse utilizing secure technologies in way that renders them useless is not a good look.

Between red team and blue team, I strongly align myself with a red team mindset. Recent cybersecurity courses like CS 463 Cryptography for Cybersecurity showed how mathematically complex tools for cryptography alone are not enough for a secure cryptosystem. The angles some of the courses provide are eroding my preconceptions and I find myself going team purple…magenta as of now. Other courses reiterated topics like risk analysis or disaster recovery plans that have me looking at things from a top-level view. I see overlaps in my computer science major in this business minded area.  

Computer science is an easy major to connect to cybersecurity as I am already studying it. Some other related majors include Information Technology, Philosophy, and Computer Engineering. IT I assume would emphasize business needs more so than computer science. These business needs include securing the information travelling across these computers. Philosophy is interesting because it can create notions of what is justifiable in the cyberspace. What kind of data is intrinsic to a person, and does it deserve to be private? These among other abstract questions will lead to how technologies are implemented and regulated. Computer Engineering is about the hardware which is an important point of concern. For example, GPUs allow us to do faster computations than CPU in certain use cases. Can we leverage new hardware technologies to create more secure or faster cryptosystems? Or we can break existing ones with quantum computing?