BY: Hayun Jung
I didn’t know what blue teaming was until my sophomore year.
I walked into the WiCyS conference in Dallas not really knowing what I was doing there. I knew I liked security, vaguely. I did not know there were this many ways to be in it.
What got me was how approachable everyone was. I started talking to women already working in the field and realized I had been thinking about cybersecurity as one thing when it is actually a dozen different things. Blue team, red team, digital forensics, audit, software security, reverse engineering. Nobody handed me a map. I just kept following what interested me.
I joined the WiCyS mentorship program and my mentor walked me through what audit actually looks like day to day, which I had never even considered. I took reverse engineering and computer networks. I did an internship at a data science center working on software security. Then I went to the Massachusetts Attorney General’s office to try the forensics and legal side, and it turned out I loved it.
The conference in Dallas also had a CTF. I had so much fun that I went home and eventually ran one myself, writing the reverse engineering challenges for our local WiCyS chapter event.
That is the thing nobody tells you when you are starting out: you do not have to know what area you want yet. Go to the CTF. Talk to the person next to you. Take the class that sounds slightly too hard. The field is big enough that there is something in it for you, you just have to poke around until you find it.
If you are feeling overwhelmed, that is normal. Start small. WiCyS exists exactly for this.