Introduction
As I prepared to begin applying to different internships in order to get the best opportunity possible for the Old Dominion University Online Summer 2026 Semester, I had some issues due to multiple ongoing personal matters regarding my family, leaving my time split between managing my grades in the current classes I was taking, applying for graduate classes in the Old Dominion University 2026 Fall Semester and securing a viable internship, which led the last of three to be put on the backburner. Realistically, for my resume, it would have been for the best to gain experience from multiple reputable companies who have a larger name in the cybersecurity or information technologies sphere, however the internship I settled with carried its own set of benefits for me, due in part to it being a family company in which I would likely be the one to deal with and handle if it were passed to me.
Auspex Technologies LLC, the company was chosen to internship with, is a small firm founded in 2001 by Nicole Geesey, who is the President and chief executive officer of the company, which is currently based in Haymarket, Virginia. The company mainly exists to serve the purpose of being a consulting firm specializing in working with the United Stated Federal Government, and commercial industries, to secure physical and digital property from cyber threats, as well as help upgrade and optimize technology for agencies based on the latest computing and networking technologies, including that of integrating 1Pv6 in place of IPv4 in the Federal Government. One of the main contractors of Auspex Technologies LLC, and more specifically Dale Geesey, the chief operating officer and a subject matter expert in the field, is the United States Department of Defense.
My initial orientation and training consisted of largely as review on what I already had known and studied as well as a discussion on the objectives present for the internship as well as short-term and long-term goals. As my internship took place with a not very large company, there was no particular orientation or training videos personalized for the company’s use, and was instead largely handled in person, while each week I would get to receive a list of objectives on my email and meet with my mentor to discuss the goals for the upcoming week. I was concerned about the internship somewhat on whether or not I should treat it with more formal care or more of a casual care, and ultimately, I believe I began with more of a formal care role and became more comfortable and casual with the expectations in time, which has been the way with my previous occupations as well.
The learning objectives present during my internship were of a looser definition in part to allow growth and understanding in my role and the change in interests over time, specifically, keeping focus on learning how to use standard security tools within the cybersecurity industry, to gain hands-on experience using multiple security system fundamentals, to gain and understanding and demonstrate the underlying knowledge of security principles as well as do the same for the use of artificial intelligence tools and their role in the future of the cybersecurity. While unstated, the clear path of my goals had been derived around the idea of in part giving myself some more stable foundational knowledge about the industry, with a highlight on how Auspex Technologies LLC typically conducted work.
Management Environment
One of the very first things that my internship with Auspex Technologies LLC provided me with was a standard weekly structure to abide by in order to properly keep track of my hours and progress with different assignments and projects. Among the first actions I took as an intern were to stabilize myself within the company by creating a new email specifically for business use within the company. This was shortly followed by creating a google drive shared between my mentor and I, in which I would add upload any of the files, documents or spreadsheets I had been working on at the end of the week to monitor my progress and review what I had submitted when my mentor and I met to discuss the active goals related to my internship and the avenues the company could take to improve in the future. Early on the importance of Microsoft Excel was also outlined to me for managerial purposes, specifically when it came to documenting the hours I had worked for the week in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet and then uploading it to the shared google drive for ease of availability between the members of the company.
As briefly mentioned in the introduction portion of my paper, and the prior paragraph, as often as my mentor’s schedule would allow each week, we would meet to discuss specific goals for the week and review the work I had submitted at the end of the previous week. This was a good way to both self-reflect on my own work and gain ample insight into how I could improve in my work in the future, including what details were important professionally and what details could be left out of the equation in the future for more effective work. At the beginning of each week, my mentor would send me a list of items to work on throughout the week, or at times multiple week assignments or projects, mainly with the details of what exactly he was looking for clearly stated within the sentences used to describe each item.
While most of the time my progress on my assigned duties were not being directly overseen, largely due to my mentor’s work schedule being rather busy due to details of his contract expiring and then receiving a new contract beginning the next day, however there were sufficient guidelines for me to follow in order to progress on my tasks, allowing for me to be busy through my time allotted working during my internship. Perhaps my internship was not the most solidly structured one possible, however the weekly reviews and planning sessions were effective in giving me feedback for improvements and the independence in examining each of my assignments allowed me to both become more self-confident in my own abilities, learn to effectively coordinate my time between tasks based on what needed to be finished the same week or had a longer time to be worked on and make my own improvements through experience rather than simply following a format. I believe in this way that the management structure of my internship was rather efficient and allowed me to grow at a steady pace.
Assignments and Projects
Within my role as an intern, the main sorts of assignments I would often work on would primarily be tied to researching information on the best tools that would be of benefit to small businesses in the information technologies and cybersecurity field. After researching this information, I would either synthesize it into a list or a spreadsheet to better keep track and visualize the information that I had found, as well as write notes about said tools on how they could be best used to benefit the company involved, whether if it could be directly beneficial to Auspex Technologies LLC or another related company that is in need of consultation. As Auspex Technologies LLC is a rather small consulting firm focused on assisting other agencies, be it commercial or federally sponsored, with updating their current technologies to include newer models and strategies to best secure the online environments of the company, such information I was researching would both be beneficial to the company of Auspex Technologies LLC itself in development of more efficient and effective investments in the progress of technology, as well as for the future consumers of the service Auspex Technologies LLC provides.
As such, I would often investigate newer technologies and at times newer policies with a cybersecurity basis that was needed for Auspex Technologies LLC to continue to function as it has been doing. In terms of the technology, my mentor has specifically largely been toying with the idea of using artificial intelligence to optimize workflow and wished to gain a greater understanding of artificial intelligence and how it could best be used, thus he gave multiple assignments in regard to learning more about artificial intelligence, and specifically how it could revolutionize the cybersecurity industry. My first task of such nature was to create a spreadsheet based on the pricing of different artificial intelligence models regarding how they were developed and how they are best used according to what they have been trained on. After one of the weekly meeting sessions reviewing this original spreadsheet, I would be assigned to go on and expand this search even further, adding more artificial intelligence models and more information on each.
For this task, I would focus on the specialty of each artificial intelligence model, such as the artificial intelligence Cursor largely revolving around the use of coding, then I would separate the pricing and benefits of each of the payment tiers that say they will provide more benefits to the user and list out the aforementioned benefits. The spreadsheet would then contain information about each artificial intelligence model’s free tier, and each of their paid tiers, and then based on the information and benefits provided the artificial intelligence tools would be ranked against one another to see which is the most overall worth it, and which is the better for specific use cases. As an example, ChatGPT was the best overall use case, while Cursor was the best specifically when looking for coding, with Github Copilot being the second best for coding but being significantly better when considering IDEs, or integrated development environments. Itemizing the different artificial intelligence models in this way creates the ability to swiftly look for the model with the best use case for a specific problem or business, allowing more practical applications to strengthen the efficiency of businesses and understanding the capabilities of the tools available is incredibly important regardless of whether or not it is artificial intelligence being used.
Outside of investigating artificial intelligence models, I was also assigned to look into how to best capitalize from different functions of artificial intelligence models, using such tactics as prompt engineering to gain a more detailed or better understood response from the artificial intelligence model involved. While understanding the capabilities of the artificial intelligence model is the first step into integrating artificial intelligence meaningfully into businesses through use of the correctly trained model, understanding how to use the tool to the best extent possible is the second step to effectively allow artificial intelligence to take an active role in the business sphere instead needing frequent corrections or needing to attempt the prompt once more. My mentor specifically wanted me to go through and collect different avenues on courses, videos and tools that best explain how to properly use prompt engineering to elicit a worthwhile response from the artificial intelligence tool. Among the videos that I would look into, many of the ones directly discussing prompt engineering were from the makers of ClaudeAI, a writing and idea generation aid, Anthropic, who are one of the foremost leaders in looking towards the future of artificial intelligence in more ways than one, often discussed how they trained the ClaudeAI to best respond, as well as giving very logical advice of not intrinsically trusting the output of the artificial intelligence model and instead verifying to make sure that the answer is accurate, but also to trust the model enough with the information it needs to generate the prompt in the first place. One of the employees featured in the video described it best as simply writing down whatever is in your brain in order to get the best response you are looking for from the artificial intelligence.
Prompt engineering works differently for different cases of artificial intelligence, as generative artificial intelligence is not the only use case for artificial intelligence, agentic artificial intelligence often has generative portions factored into it, but it is far from the back-and-forth user-initiated answers that generative artificial intelligence primarily provides. An agentic artificial intelligence system instead provides a more action oriented role as an assistant and autonomously follows an ongoing prompt of workflow to handle its set activities within guidelines, this often being in line with scheduling, researching and automatically drafting emails to be sent without need for a human hand to guide it every step of the way. Aside from simply looking into different generative systems of artificial intelligence and comparing them, this research also extended towards how agentic artificial intelligence can be of benefit to small companies and what free agentic systems were currently available to be used to test the artificial intelligence’s application. This would lead me into one of my next assignments, and the last of which I will discuss in this portion of the paper, in relation to artificial intelligence.
The application of artificial intelligence is very simple on the surface and it is quite easy to see how such a tool can be used in both beneficial and detrimental ways, but with artificial intelligence, especially on a wider scale, there is a certain technological requirement to keep the workflow of artificial intelligence stable and efficient, which leads to my assignment being research into what computing systems work best as onsite applications for artificial intelligence. Like many of my other assignments, this too had a focus surrounding what tools could be good to acquire or invest in to help a small or growing company that seeks to introduce artificial intelligence into its workforce and rank those onsite appliances on how well they would perform for that small company. These onsite appliances were then ranked based off of their pricing, their size and portability, how customizable they were, how much data that could be handled and their speed. To no surprise, what I settled on being the overall best contender for the scenario listed was the Apple Mac Mini M4/M4 Pro Chip, however given the current market for artificial intelligence being so rapidly on the rise, when my mentor reviewed the list I had created, the price of the Apple Mac Mini had already been increased and as my mentor said, it was likely difficult to get ahold of them due to the strong demand. Instead, the second product I listed, which was meant to be a more budget friendly alternative to the Apple Mac Mini, the Beelink EQR6, took his interest due to it essentially being a budget Apple Mac Mini as well.
While a large part of my internship focused on the future of technology, I was also instructed with the opportunity to look more into the classic technology and concepts of the cybersecurity field, including the concept of a zero trust security approach and the usage of the Department of Defense’s Security Technical Implementation Guides, or DOD STIGs, and what to expect from them by actively looking through a stigviewer application with many listed. Similarly, I would look more into how prominent and precise self-review is and needs to be in the cybersecurity industry through examining the recent implementations of Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certifications, or CMMCs, in which the first two levels, which were of interest to my mentor as he actively needed to learn more about what comprised each of the levels to understand what was necessary for Auspex Technologies LLC to abide by in the future, are largely comprised of a checklist of different security specifications the given company needs to follow, with the Level 2 requirements having a significant the amount of guidelines as Level 1 did, as well mandating a third-party to review the agency in question in stead if the information being dealt with by the organization could be a threat to national security.
I was also given a longer ongoing task throughout the weeks of my internship to work with the company’s Ubiquiti UniFi Dream Machine Pro, or UDM-Pro, and examen the terrain and the security abilities of the security appliance and use the data within it to conduct a site survey of Auspex Technologies LLC’s network. This site survey included a spreadsheet with all the information listed about what devices connected to the network was connected to which switch, as well as if they were connected wirelessly or which port they were connected through, as well as the physical location of all of the different devices connected to the network, the models of the devices and then both the Internet Protocol addresses, or IP addresses, and the mac addresses for every device. Then, using this information I created a network diagram illustrating the general structural layout of the network. While it was not the most outwardly difficult task, it was the one that required the most fiddling, time and effort to be poured into it, more in a sort of tedious manner.
Hands-On Application of Knowledge
During my internship I was able largely able to use some of the prior knowledge I had about the cybersecurity industry to deepen my understanding of what I was learning and working on throughout my internship, primarily in regard to how applying each of the different assignments I was working on through a cybersecurity lens. When my assignment was to look into DOD STIGs, I already had an idea of what they would be through my prior studies but I also knew how I could clear up gaps in my knowledge through quick research, which allowed me to easily find how to access stigviewer 3.0 and begin to look into different STIGs. After reviewing STIGs, I could then apply the same logic I learned from researching the DOD STIGs when I was investigating what the CMMC Level 1 and Level 2 requirements were and what it meant for small businesses, as they were in a sense just longer versions of STIGs implied to far more complex machinery. While STIGs were applied to a machine to have guidelines on acceptable was to have it function that were secure, the CMMC Levels were similarly guidelines but focused around the far more malleable company, which should in essence work like a machine to do jobs, but in practice were a lot more volatile due to the more human elements that companies have to deal with. In both cases, there were frankly tedious amounts of tiny specifications that seemed insignificant but were incredibly important to apply in order certify that the information being stored within the companies and devices are kept confidential and available.
Similarly, I got the chance to examine the security procedures being done at a data center near me while accompanying my mentor, whom had given me a verbal checklist of different items and protocols to look for while we visited to see if the data center measured up rather well. I was able to use this visit, along with my prior knowledge of how incredibly important guidelines being followed was to the longevity and safety of data as well as a data center, to see how well the data center was preforming security wise, as well as seeing the layout of a data center and properly visualizing new information I would glean from that. The day prior to the visit, I had to sign up online and give verifiable information about my identity in order to receive a QR code I would need to scan to ‘sign in’ to the data center, where I would also need to sign out when I left the data center to acknowledge when I was there and how long my visit was. Similarly, I had to wear a plastic sticker like a nametag the entire time I was within the confines of the data center, and it was verbally agreed upon that I would only be able to accompany my mentor, though given that one actively needed a code and a form of access card to walk between different sections of the data center and use elevators, it would have been difficult to move around in the first place without shadowing my mentor. All of the cages within the dark data center were locked and I always acknowledged that there were cameras keeping track of where someone was, that paired with the motion activated lights would’ve made it incredibly difficult for someone to have moved freely to tamper with the data being held there physically, especially without any kind of surveillance catching them in the act.
I was also on the look out for such things as fire extinguishers, as while data centers largely exist to store a large amount of data and act as a sort of transmitter for information stored inside and out of it and are heavily blocked from the damaging elements of the external world, like sunlight and rain, it doesn’t preclude anything devastating from beginning inside of the data center itself, such as a fire, thus meaning there would need to be frequent fire extinguishers nearby to handle any possible flames. Especially as what is kept in the individual rented out cages is largely up to the person who has rented the cage, and thus it is their duty to make sure that the technology within the cage doesn’t malfunction, however as the age old saying goes, its better to be safe than to be sorry, and providing a fire extinguisher at the edge of just about every block of cages, almost always keeping it in arms reach, creates a much safer physical environment for the data and any people inside of the data center itself. One thing I did notice against the data center I visited, however, is that while there were signs about no weapons being allowed and while my driver’s license was taken from me multiple times to ascertain I wasn’t a threat or anyone that should be barred from entrance, there were never actually any bag check or metal detector to ascertain that I wasn’t carrying any weapons on me, which I do think makes the process of going to the data center smoother for trustworthy individuals, but I also am of the belief that it’s a lapse in judgement that heightens the chance of something being broken into, stolen or destroyed. I believe with this sort of practical assignment listing the different security protocols I noticed and actively being on the look out for any of the guidelines data centers are meant to follow helped me understand further just how necessary a job a security professional is, and how fluid guidelines can be when they being seen casually rather than threating each case with severity.
ODU Curriculum Preparations
I found that throughout my internship there was I lot that I didn’t know and could learn, but I don’t believe that the curriculum at Old Dominion University Global, or simply as the acronym ODU I will be continuously referring to it as for ease, was lacking in any way shape or form, but rather due to many of the choices I made towards my classes being for far more general subjects in information technology, networking and cybersecurity. These classes didn’t provide me with every tool I needed, though they provided me with a strong basis to understand and innovate on what I could learn through what I have already learned during my time at ODU.
One such example of this is when I was learning how to access and read through DOD STIGs, the experience I had with multiple of my ODU classes helped me understand what was specifically being written and talked about and how to apply said changes, as many of them specifically were looking to make general changes, like additions to the general code structure of devices to cover any glaring weaknesses, which while I didn’t have much context on, I could understand how I would have to implement the changes and how I would go about testing to make sure they changes took and heightened the security of the given device. Similarly, it was due to my knowledge of how to find documentation during research that I was able to effectively find and apply concepts I had already learned about during classes, both ones that were cybersecurity related and otherwise, to CMMCs. This way, I was able to understand the changes that would need to be made and how to best approach and account for the details, while being able to summarize them back into a more standard English form to be easily understood by others.
How ODU helped me also applied more directly in some cases, as my mentor would talk about how it is often the littlest things in cybersecurity that get overlooked and cause the most glaring of vulnerabilities, referencing specifically the July of 2006 United States Department of State data breach, in which Chinese hackers used what would be considered a more simple sort of hacking today, a password cracking tool which swiftly bypassed the simplistic passwords used by the administrators of the, at the time, unclassified computer networks, and easily leaked sensitive information like employee identities and credentials, as well as diplomatic intelligence. It was through ODU classes that I knew what password cracking tools were like and how to use them, as well as knowing of similar incidents that I had researched in the past, such as one that had taken place earlier this year in France where a lot of financial and identifiable information was scraped off of the Ministry of Finance’s archive due to one of the employee’s passwords getting compromised. The zero trust security approach was yet another piece of information I first learned about through the ODU curriculum and would later research more into for my internship, though I already had a strong basis on it due to what I had learned at ODU.
ODU’s curriculum unequivocally assisted me in understanding a lot of information I learned more about in the duration of my internship, both with the general concepts of cybersecurity as well as some of the more specific information that came up. I believe this would be the same in many other fields as well, as it would be difficult to cover every specification of cybersecurity or policy or every vulnerability and method to threaten a database’s sensitive information and I truly do not believe there would be a better way to include all of the information I learned or learned how to learn during my internship. While I wouldn’t say that ODU’s curriculum fully prepared me to take on a role as a cybersecurity intern, let alone a more advanced role in the cybersecurity field thus far, I didn’t feel completely out of my element in large part due to the academics at ODU which broadened my knowledge of cybersecurity. Of course, ODU also helped in the technical aspect of learning how to write professional papers and structure my thoughts in manner that could summarize or that could fully explain a concept in a professional way, regardless of the manner in which that information would be sent.
Objectives
Perhaps I am a bit of a perfectionist in this regard, or the initial objectives set by my mentor were a little loose in wording, but while I would claim to be more competent in all of the objectives that had been set at the beginning of my paper, I certainly wouldn’t claim myself to be perfect in any regard of the goals that had been set at the beginning of my internship. My first objective was to understand and demonstrate knowledge of underlying cybersecurity principles, which I do believe I fulfilled rather well through deeper learning about concepts such as zero trust, as well as through learning more about how guidelines and audits are structured and typically applied to both technical devices and organizations as a whole. Similarly, I believe the second object was also given an adequate amount of attention as it related to learning how to use standard cybersecurity tools which are often used within the industry, both commercially and federally, which I believe had been represented well in my internship through my learning about the networking company Ubiquiti’s UDM-Pro and through utilizing DOD STIGs, while I would count my study of the CMMCs among these, I’m unsure exactly whether I should due to a currently outstanding reform of them currently being undergone, so I do not know if I can count them as a standard tool of the cybersecurity industry. The last objective that I explained in the introduction of my paper was related to understanding and demonstrating the usage of artificial intelligence tools in cybersecurity, which I believe I explained rather well how I interacted with artificial intelligence and researched into its many multitudes in the beginning of my paper, though I do believe it would have been better if I could have practically interacted with artificial intelligence in cybersecurity more often than I ended up doing.
Motivations
Certain aspects of my time acting as an intern at Auspex Technologies LLC were more captivating to my brain and let me think in a way which was more interesting theoretically far more than other portions of my time. I’ve always been rather interested in the more human aspects of cybersecurity and how it can largely be overlooked by the general person on what kind of information they give out in person or online, and with my accompanying my mentor to one of the data centers near us, I became rather interested in looking more at the technical side of the buildings because I found the thought process rather interesting of how they were designed. My mentor invited me to ask any of the questions I had and explained to me why the data center we visited did not feel particularly cool, as I somewhat expected it would’ve, in my mind I was visualizing a cool office sort of interior, but the dark, chain linked fenced rooms that were maybe a little more than room temperature was not what I was expecting, and though my mentor expressed dislike at how this data center was set up with cold isles and hot isles to prevent the servers from overheating through cooling the fronts of the servers, while letting the hotter air from the backs of the servers blow out the back, all in an attempt to thoroughly cool the technology while reducing the cost of air conditioning. Aside from this, I also found it rather motivating on just how much information was present and easily accessible online, specifically when I was looking into a COMPTIA Security+ Certification, there was an entirely free video series explaining just about every concept necessary, and with prompt engineering there was again an abundance of easily accessible information from YouTube videos and tutorials. STIGs were also completely and freely downloadable online. While it may seem somewhat weird, I found it strangely motivating that there seemed to be a consensus to share a lot of information, even in a field where information is meant to be treated either as a weapon or something to be protected. To me it is somewhat of a reminder that it is information that keeps us informed about potential scams that may happen and how important it is to keep our information safe in the first place.
Disparages
Over the weeks my internship took place, aside from the motivational parts and the portions of assignments I was more apathetic towards, there were also some that I did not exactly care for or found to be more difficult and discouraging to engage with. First of all was the heavy focus on artificial intelligence in my internship, I know in part that this is due to my mentor’s fascination with artificial intelligence and want to understand it better and use new innovations in technology to bolster Auspex Technologies LLC in a way that stands out to competitors and to actively push towards the future using that technology, but I felt as though there could have been more of a benefit if the effort and interest was put elsewhere for the time being and perhaps gave me the chance to try more of an active role in cybersecurity. I do also understand why it was difficult at the time, though there were things that were suggested and discussed which ended with no resolution that I would’ve at least enjoyed attempting or exploring. For less of the experience of the internship and more towards the contents of what I learned about the cybersecurity field, I found that while I rather enjoyed the highly detailed aspects of guidelines, I also came to quite dislike it due to how it felt incredibly tedious, just as I rather disliked conducting the network site survey and creating a diagram based off it, as all of the little details make feel as though I will be forgetting something. The fact that there are so many guidelines and there often needs to be hundreds for a company to follow makes me feel rather nervous or anxious that there would be something missed, either by me or by another, for the detailed aspect I enjoy the idea of creating the guidelines and thinking of all the possible solutions and problems that need to be monitored, but the idea of being the one to actually monitor things creates more of a pessimistic stress within me, in part because I prefer to be a more disorganized person in my personal life. Though, I do believe this is something that I could potentially work though in the future by simply getting comfortable with the idea of it and learning to have a rhythm or routine to the job, in part because when it comes to how I interact with plans especially, I tend to be more detail-oriented and try to account for every little bit, so while I find the little details to be rather discouraging during the internship process, I think there could absolutely be ways to for me to come to terms with the idea.
Challenges
The parts of the internship that were less motivating, as I described the section prior, placed a challenge in some of the assignments I was tasked to work on, specifically when it comes to the incredibly detailed network site survey. For one, I had to translate each and every device to a spreadsheet which is a tedious process but understandable, then list information about each device and where each connected to, arrange them in a structure that was logical to read in order for it to make sense just how one connected to the other, and many of the details of different devices connected to the network weren’t always correct. When trying to look for the device models within the Ubiquiti UDM-Pro’s information, there were multiple devices being listed under having a Samsung Galaxy S10+ model, with many of them even having a name which would imply them to be a different device entirely, that combined with my general knowledge of what devices were around on Auspex Technologies LLC’s network, I knew that the accuracy was middling for at least some of the devices. I was also struggling for a while with the network mapping itself, in part because my mentor hadn’t provided me with a basis of what vision and format he wished for the network diagram to follow, though ultimately despite the lack of basis I found roughly what he had wanted through the use of formatting with software and looking for well structured examples online. This is also somewhat a minor example of my mentor often being busy, so it felt like, at least on my end, I had to be cautious about reaching out for help during some of my tasks, while I believe I missed some of the chances to pick the brain of subject matter expert for that, it also have me the opportunity to learn in the way that I am most familiar with and often find that it suits me rather well. Of course, before finishing the network diagram I did confirm that was the sort of formatting that he was looking for.
Advice for Future Interns
I believe that the best advice I could ever give to anyone who is just beginning to venture into a new experience is to allow yourself to be adaptable, but don’t let yourself be overtrodden by what is new. I do think that it is best to be slightly pushy when it comes to asking for guidance, that way you can find out what you need to know and make certain your questions are genuine on what you are wondering about or even just for confirmation on certain aspects, as you can get more of an explanation that way. The advice that needs to be given to an intern will always depend on the person who is receiving the advice, however one thing that I believe is universal is to get just about everything in writing. If you make sure to ask for directives to come in emails or some other form of messaging system where the words are clearly typed out and easily revisited, it is easier to remember and reference for any assignments or projects you may have, then you don’t need to try and memorize the goals in your head, which may lead to misremembering facts of the situation or lead to a stalling of your goals as you try to find a reference for what you need to look into. Similarly, I believe it is generally a wise idea to write a bullet point style list at the end of every week so you can easily recall what you have learned within the week rather than let it phase out of your brain. Prior to the internship it would be wise to have some experience learning of technical based words in the cybersecurity field, though your mentor may choose to review the concepts again when talking about them just to refresh and arrive to a common definition, which is not a bad thing, but rather a mutual understanding that is beneficial for understanding your colleague.
Conclusion
Ultimately, I believe that my internship with Auspex Technologies LLC was a worthwhile opportunity and one that had went rather well, I do not believe any one internship will be perfect, nor do I believe any one job or career path will be a perfect choice for a person. As it stands, I believe internships to be best stated by giving the intern or student a taste of responsibility in the field they are looking to enter in the future or looking to acquire more experience within. While I do not believe that my internship was a perfect representation of what it is like to be in the cybersecurity industry and that the amount of responsibility was far from accurate as I was not essentially carrying an organization on my back, it’s clear to me that cybersecurity is a field that needs a lot of grounding and decisive judgement calls. In this manner, I’ve determined that the cybersecurity industry suits me in some ways, but not in every way, as I’ve always tended to be more of a head in the clouds sort of individual who is interested in looking at every possible perspective of an issue or problem to determine the best case scenario, as well as determine what steps would be needed to be taken, or what issues may arise because of said issue being mishandled. This sort of prospecting has its own merit in the field of cybersecurity, but to a differing extent than typical. What I do believe my internship with Auspex Technologies LLC has given me is a more stable footing in the industry as well as more developed perspective for when I inevitably choose what direction I wish to pursue within the industry itself, which will give me better direction in both my future professional path, as well as the future classes I take at ODU for both my remaining undergraduate credits and my graduate classes to get eventually acquire my masters.