Success In Small Doses

Last week, I shared that I had started working with TryHackMe to learn cybersecurity, and I have continued to work on this front through the past week. A couple of things have happened. The first is that while I am still ready to transition out of education, working on something else that feels like an achievement has reminded me of when I was a baby teacher. And as a baby teacher, every day was a challenge, and was different. I was learning all the time! And I realize that after 20 years in education, things have gotten boring. It’s not that there’s nothing left for me to learn—I think the idea that you’ve mastered something that well is a bit of a fallacy.

But! The cognitive moves that it takes to master skills in teaching, learning and researching for practical application in that field are skills that I have mastered.
Learning cybersecurity is forcing me to employ an entirely new set of skills, to pull up information in my brain that I long forgot. In short, I’m learning what it means to be brand-new at something all over again, and I think that has been humbling, interesting, whimsical and honestly a bit of a joy.

Even if being brand-new is also scary, frustrating and exhausting at times.

During the last week, I finished the foundations courses related to Cybersecurity.

I was surprised at home much I knew from working with Python—how much scaffolding there was to “hang” things on. And also, how many things I still had to learn; how many pieces of information I had to teach myself when I didn’t have the cognitive frameworks “installed”. But I found a lot to be thankful for: Having worked on computers generally to get things done and having worked in Python some; having grown up with a DOS-based computer at the age of 7because my dad was a computer programmer; having friends and co-workers who were willing and able to help me with the most difficult concepts and ideas.

Having done the foundations work, I moved right along. I’m already about 25% done with with first cybersecurity certificate, and I’m excited and motivated to keep going!