Thomas Roeseler

IDS 493

Professor Jessica Stanley

24 April 2025

IDS 493 Reflection Essay

This e-portfolio that I have taken the past few weeks to work on is a summary and showcase of what I have done in my academic career at Old Dominion University. I put a lot of work into this and I think it looks really good and I am proud of the work I did with it. My academic career has been a pretty impressive one, I believe and this e-portfolio will be able to showcase that. This e-portfolio includes three skills that I’ve obtained and improved throughout my academic career at Old Dominion University and each skill contains 3 artifacts that showcase that skill. Also included in this e-portfolio is a welcome page, my resume, and this reflection essay. The welcome page comes with a little ‘about me’ paragraph, a picture of me, and my personal narrative essay. This reflection essay will reflect on my work throughout my academic career at ODU and the process of creating this e-portfolio.

The homepage of my e-portfolio is a welcome page titled ‘Welcome!’ The homepage of my e-portfolio starts strong in my opinion because the front looks like a professional e-portfolio website. I like how I started my e-portfolio with my most recent fraternity composite photo with my name under it because it is a professional headshot taken by a professional photographer. I chose this composite photo over the first two because I look very different now from my first one and the second one I could not get the watermark off of it. Followed by the photo of me is an introduction about me paragraph which is then followed by the personal narrative essay. There is also a resume page that is the next page if you look at the menu that includes my resume. This is my updated resume that excludes any jobs that I had prior to high school that won’t help me for an IT or cybersecurity job.

The next thing on the menu is the skills tab which is a drop down on the menu which includes all three skills, research skills, time management skills, and hardware assembly/knowledge. The first skill in the drop down menu is research skills. The three artifacts that I included in my research skills page all come from different classes. The first one is a group presentation from CYSE 200T that is about the Dyn DDoS attack in 2016. The second one is another group presentation, but it was in IT 315 and it was about the physical layer of the OSI model. The last artifact is my IDS 300W interdisciplinary research paper which in my opinion is the ultimate research assignment anyone ever has to do. There were many assignments from many of my classes that I could have used for this skill, but I believe I chose the best three that display research skills. Research skills are important in the cybersecurity field because it is important to be able to understand and research cyber threats and vulnerabilities as well as being able to investigate attacks.

The first artifact included on the research skills page is a group presentation on the 2016 Dyn DDoS Attack. This presentation, my group members and I worked very hard on and got great feedback from the professor. Before doing this assignment, I didn’t know about the DDoS attack against Dyn Corporation, so I had to do a ton of research to put this presentation together. In the presentation, we included a timeline on the events of the DDoS attack as well as the impact of the attack, how the attack happened, and mitigation strategies for DDoS attacks. I chose this presentation as one of my artifacts for research skills because it was a great presentation that had great feedback and it was one of the best examples that can show my research skills.

The second artifact included to show my research skills is another group presentation, but this time from IT 315 about the physical layer of the OSI model. This presentation was another presentation that I got good feedback on and I believe that it showcases my research skills. This presentation included an overview of the physical layer of the OSI model, devices/protocols associated with the physical layer, interactions with other layers in the OSI model, and challenges that the physical layer may face. Before I started researching for this assignment, I knew a little bit about the physical layer of the OSI model, but as I researched it, I was able to familiarize myself pretty well with this layer. I chose to include this presentation in my e-portfolio because like the first artifact, I got good feedback on it and I believe it is a pretty well-organized presentation that showcases my research skills.

The third artifact which I believe is the best artifact for presenting my research skills is the IDS 300W interdisciplinary research paper. To me this paper is the ultimate research assignment because this takes almost the entire semester. The whole class is just slowly leading up to finishing the paper step-by-step. It is a 10-page paper that took a lot of time and effort. The research was the longest part of the process because I had to research various disciplines and be comfortable speaking from that discipline because I had to use disciplinary concepts from multiple disciplines because it was an interdisciplinary research project. For my research paper, I had a topic surrounding cybersecurity and the disciplines I chose to use were the political science, sociology, and economics disciplines. The reason I chose to put this research paper in my e-portfolio as an artifact for research skills is because it is the best presentation of my research skills.

The next page under the skills tab is the time management skills page. Time management skills are very important to have, no matter who you are. Time management skills are hard to improve on because the only way you’ll be able to improve them is if you actually have to because of how busy you are. My time management skills can be represented by many things, but I chose to use my internship final paper, my AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Certification, and an ethical hacking assignment from CYSE 450 because these were things that took a lot of time and were done during probably the busiest two semesters of my college career. Not only did I have an internship, and take many classes during 2024, but I was also involved in my fraternity as I was on the executive board as the Vice President of Member Development for the entire year. Going into my final two semesters, I had a GPA of 3.87 which is not easy if you can’t manage time well and work hard and focus. If you put most people in my position, they would not be able to succeed as well as I was able to. 

The first artifact I chose for my time management skills was my internship paper that was 17 pages. I was working/interning at IPConfigure as a Hardware Assembly Technician, I took a total of 27 credits during these two semesters, and I was on the executive board of my fraternity, Sigma Phi Epsilon. Trying to fit in as many hours as possible a week working at IPConfigure without sacrificing any school mishaps was my goal and I killed that goal. Not only did I not get below a B+ in any class during this calendar year, I was able to work on average 22 hours a week. With all of this I was still serving on the executive board of my fraternity as the Vice President of Member Development where I had to organize multiple events each semester as well as plan and manage other tasks. And being in a fraternity itself is already time consuming because I have meetings to attend regardless of holding a position or not, and there are various events that brothers are required to attend. My internship shows my time management skills because I was able to get over 150 hours of working during a busy semester that I’m also taking other time-consuming classes in. 

The next artifact that I chose to put in my time management skills page was the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Certification that I was issued in November 2024. This certification took a lot of time to study for as I studied for it for almost the entire Fall 2024 semester. It was a stressful certification to get and I was able to pass it while taking other classes, having an internship, and being on the executive board of my fraternity. I think getting any certification during a semester shows how good my time management skills are because of all the other things going on at the same time. It shows that I allowed myself to set time aside to study for a certification on top of all the other things going on for me.

The final artifact that is included in my time management skills page is an ethical hacking assignment from CYSE 450. This was another class that I took during my busy 2024. This assignment was one of the longest assignments in this class and I think it is a good fit to add to the time management skills section because if you look at the assignment, you can see how long it really took. With 20+ screenshots included in the assignment, you can tell that I had to work on this assignment for quite some time. 

The final skill I chose to use in my e-portfolio is hardware assembly/knowledge. On the hardware assembly/knowledge page, there is a picture included from my internship of a server that I built before I finished cable management and closing it up to image it and ship it off. The first artifact I included on this page was the first reflection paper of the CYSE 368 internship course. This reflection paper talked about my first 50 hours of the internship and focused on what I had learned and the process we go through as Hardware Assembly Technicians.

The second artifact for Hardware Assembly/Knowledge is a storage research assignment for IT 201. This storage research assignment didn’t involve all the hardware that I use on a daily basis at IPConfigure, but it included a hard drive and flash drive that I work with pretty much every day. DVDs, however I do not work with ever. The storage research assignment only focused on storage devices and I had to create a table for this assignment that described features and other aspects about the devices. I think this was a good assignment to add to the hardware assembly/knowledge section because it shows the knowledge more than it does assembly like the rest of the artifacts for this skill.

The final artifact for Hardware Assembly/Knowledge is the second reflection paper for CYSE 368, my internship at IPConfigure. This reflection paper gives more of a focus to troubleshooting various issues with hardware components. There was one example included where there was a bad motherboard, but you can’t always tell the issue right away, so you test different parts and figure out what it was. Also included in this reflection paper were pictures of the imaging process for imaging servers to give the reader a better idea of what I’m doing and what it looks like.

Creating my e-portfolio was a long process, but it was a helpful learning experience because I was able to go back through my ODU career and find skills that I’ve obtained and improved throughout my academic career. I was able to find assignments that I could use as artifacts to showcase these skills. In the end, I used 9 total artifacts to show my research skills, time management, skills and hardware assembly/knowledge. All of these skills that I used in my e-portfolio can help me in the future as they are important skills I want to have to get an IT/cybersecurity job. The e-portfolio was designed well and represents my hard work through my academic career.