My name is Stivan Wilburn, and I am a Senior Cybersecurity student at Old Dominion University. This ePortfolio was created to showcase my academic projects and growing skillset in cybersecurity.

A little about me: I was born in Radford, Virginia, and grew up in nearby Blacksburg. As a kid, I never fit the typical “tech nerd” stereotype. I wasn’t into Pokémon, anime like Dragon Ball Z, or superhero movies. Instead, I had two deep childhood obsessions — football and Texas. I could rattle off facts about Texas history and culture with ease, and I studied football like it was a full-time job. This was during the Chris Simms era at Texas, right before the Vince Young years and the legendary 2005 championship run, back when the glory days were still just on the horizon.

I didn’t have a computer at home until fifth grade, when I got my first desktop, a Gateway machine. I wasn’t excited to play games on it; I was excited to dive deeper into the things I loved, using the early days of the internet (Ask Jeeves, Yahoo, ESPN) to learn as much as I could. At the time, I didn’t recognize this for what it was. I wasn’t consciously thinking about cybersecurity or even technology as a career. But looking back, those early habits — the desire to find information, to understand systems, and to piece things together — were the first signs of the path I would eventually follow.

During my senior year of high school, I signed up for an elective course called “Computer Technology.” At the time, I had a vague, casual interest in hacking — not in any serious way, but enough to think the class might be fun or at least different from my usual coursework. I imagined learning the more granular level theories of how hackers operate.

That excitement didn’t last long. Our very first assignment was to code a simple message in binary. I remember staring at the endless ones and zeros, feeling overwhelmed and disconnected. It immediately seemed too complicated, too abstract for me. I decided right then that I wasn’t going to invest much effort into the class, especially since I had already met all my graduation requirements. For the rest of the semester, I spent most of the 45-minute class periods listening to my iPod and browsing luxury real estate listings on Sotheby’s and LuxuryRealEstate.com. My ambitions at the time were drifting elsewhere. I was more focused on the idea of becoming an attorney and moving to a city like Atlanta. Technology felt distant, and cybersecurity wasn’t even remotely on my radar yet.

During my early college years, I met someone who had a background that immediately caught my attention. He had previously been questioned by the police and even the FBI for hacking into his school district’s system and changing grades back when he was in high school. At the time we met, he was studying engineering at a premier university in Texas, and he had an impressive understanding of how systems worked. It planted a seed of curiosity in me that would take years to fully grow, but those conversations definitely stuck. One of the funniest details from his story was about how his friend’s mother tried to explain things when the authorities got involved. She insisted to the FBI agents that her son had simply “hit the wrong button.”

At one point, I had seriously considered becoming an attorney. I liked the idea of the career path — the structure, the prestige, and the opportunity to build a professional life in a city like Atlanta or somewhere else in the South. But the more I looked into it, the more the reality became clear: law school was a massive investment, both in terms of time and money. It would require years of education, thousands in debt, and no guaranteed return. Eventually, I made the practical decision to walk away from that idea.

Instead, I turned toward a field where I already had real-world connections and a marketable skillset I had worked hard to build: pipe welding.

Working as a pipe welder taught me lessons I would carry with me long after I left the trade. It demanded intense, laser-precision focus staying locked in on the same task for hours on end, knowing there was almost no room for error. A small mistake could ruin hours of work, resulting in you failing a “weld-test” and costing you your job. It was a daily test of patience, precision, and perseverance. I also learned something equally valuable: the importance of small, often-overlooked improvements. Older journeymen — guys who had been in the trade for decades — would show me little tricks and adjustments that made a massive difference. It taught me to appreciate how small refinements, when applied consistently, could completely change the efficiency and quality of your work. It gave me a huge appreciation for people who have committed themselves to something and had that real-world deep knowledge for their profession that cant be taught or learned from a book. I came to understand that in most fields you have the “OGs” or the “real-ones”, guys who just know their stuff inside-out and upside down and know the game like the back of their hand.

While pipe welding taught me a lot, it also showed me its limits. The work was hard on the body — long hours in difficult environments, physical strain, and the constant risk of injury. Beyond the physical toll, it was also hard on personal life. The jobs were often far from home, requiring travel, odd hours, and a lifestyle that made stability difficult. I started to realize that while welding had been a valuable chapter, it wasn’t the path I wanted for the rest of my life.

Looking for something that would challenge me mentally and open new long-term opportunities, I made the decision to enlist in the United States Navy, specifically as a Cryptologic Technician Networks (CTN).
From the beginning, it was clear the training pipeline would not be easy. I was selected to attend the Joint Cyber Analysis Course (JCAC), an advanced program crafted by the NSA to prepare cyber operators across all military branches. JCAC had a reputation for being brutally difficult, with roughly a 40% washout rate even among highly motivated service members. Passing through that course wasn’t just a box to check — it was a serious accomplishment, and it validated that I had the ability to operate at a high technical level under pressure.

After graduating, I was stationed first at Navy Information Operations Command (NIOC) Hawaii, and later at the Navy Cyber Warfare Development Group in Fort Meade, Maryland.
Serving in these cleared facilities exposed me to real-world cyber operations at a scale and intensity few people experience. I worked alongside highly skilled professionals, learning advanced network defense techniques, digital forensics, penetration testing, and threat analysis.
The environments were serious, fast-paced, and demanded constant attention to detail — not unlike welding, but now with much higher stakes in the digital world.

The Navy didn’t just sharpen my technical skills. It also reinforced habits of discipline, analytical thinking, and problem-solving under stress. It showed me how cybersecurity isn’t just about knowing tools — it’s about thinking critically, moving precisely, and working relentlessly, often without recognition, in defense of something larger than yourself.