Introduction

My time in the Cybersecurity program here at ODU has been a serious balancing act. Completing my degree while already working as a network engineer made me unsure about how much “new” stuff I’d pick up through my classes, but the curriculum really forced me to move past just making things work and into thinking about why and how they need to be secured.

If I had to pin down the most valuable skills I’ve refined, it’s definitely the combination of applying cybersecurity in society and cyber ethics concepts to my real-life work with CMMC compliance. My learning from these courses gave me a much more disciplined approach to creating policies for my company to follow in order to maintain strict compliance standards.

Program Reflection

The most valuable part of my time at ODU was seeing the other side of my work. At my job, I’m deep in the weeds of hardware and software, but my digital forensics course opened my eyes to the legal and forensic side of things. Learning about things like Windows registry artifacts and studying the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act changed how I look at the network logs my company ingests daily. Instead of data and alerts to slog through, I now see them as potential evidence.

One of the biggest obstacles I hit was trying to balance my course load with my day job. Especially the Spring 2026 semester, where I was taking five courses alongside working full 30-hour weeks, took a lot out of me in terms of time management and time spent working nonstop. It ultimately served to my benefit, though, as these skills will be employed in my work for the rest of my life.

My background experience with various networking hardware and software definitely gave me a head start on some of my simpler classes, like cybersecurity fundamentals, so I could focus on the harder stuff. For instance, my software engineering course this semester has us building an entire program, including all the documentation and an SRS-830 Specification sheet. Without my valuable background experience, I would have had a much tougher time dealing with my daily workload.

IDS 493 Reflection

If I had to describe this course to someone who hasn’t taken it, I’d call it the Synthesis/Aggregation phase of your college experience. It’s the capstone where you start building a professional narrative to demonstrate to potential employers that you’re worth noting. It’s about taking years of lab reports, code snippets, network diagrams, and experiences and turning them into a proper portfolio that actually shows a recruiter who you are.

The most interesting part of this course for me was the deep dive into professional branding. You can build as many programs as you want, but it’s another thing entirely to explain why any of that matters to a hiring manager. I’m most proud of my cybersecurity internship page. I didn’t have an internship per se, as I used my existing job as a stand-in for an internship, but I think it gives a great degree of insight into my work and what kind of employee I am.

The hardest part of this course was definitely the translation aspect. Explaining technical issues in a way that sounds impressive rather than frustrating takes a surprising amount of work. If I had infinite time, I’d probably create custom visuals for walkthroughs of issues I’ve had to solve. I addressed these challenges by leaning on the documentation habits I picked up in my earlier software courses, which helped me keep the portfolio organized and not rambling.

Conclusion

Looking back on the program as a whole, the interdisciplinary approach was essential to my learning. By drawing connections between Windows and Linux system administration and the hardening of machines that I perform at work, I gained a better perspective on the massive puzzle that is maintaining secure environments. Cybersecurity is where software engineering, network infrastructure, social science, and law collide. In this field, you have to be an interdisciplinary thinker. A network guy who doesn’t understand software is a liability, and a dev who doesn’t understand basic networking is going to write insecure code. ODU hammered home the idea that we have to bridge those gaps in understanding.

After I finish my undergraduate degree here at ODU, I plan to continue to implement my learning into my role as a Network Engineer, and in 2027, pursue my Master’s degree. I want to continue my work within the federal contracting space, but with a much stronger and more specialized level of base knowledge.