Investment Analysis

My investment towards becoming an engineer.

^ Darvin and Norton model illustration

Ever since the first day of my High School engineering class, it has been my goal to have engineering as my profession. It was during year 9, at school, when I was tasked to build a Rube Goldberg machine that automated many human processes. Back then, it wasn't an important thing to think about your future career but for me, I found a great appeal to the logical thought process that engineers possessed. However, now at University of Technology Sydney it is clear that everything i did back then was a continued investment for my dream of becoming an engineer.

During my school days, I spent my time carefully crafting my identity, ideology and capital to further myself in the path to create as many opportunities as possible. While everyone was having lunch during lunch breaks, I was involving myself in the environmental club. Which I then used as a stepping stone to advance as the school's environmental leader, where I shaped and managed the school's environment with continuous restoration projects.

However, the turning point came to me on May 2017, when the education platform Edmodo was compromised which resulted in the exposure of 77 million records comprised of around 43 million unique customer email addresses. The records in the breach included usernames, email addresses and B-crypt hashes password hashes of teachers/ students. The helpless feeling of being unable to do anything motivated me to seek out the Cyber Security path, other than software engineering component.

^Illustration from deepweb-sites.com

The Cybersec Society at University of Technology was also a major factor for my pursuit of this career path. One of most important things I have learnt from its members is to proactively utilise my knowledge to benefit the general public. The society actively engages in workshop sessions to educate the public regarding the current cyber attack trends, such as OSINT.

Overall the engineer identity is vital in the modern cyberscape, as it is the gears that drives continuous innovation to solve humanity's current and future problems, "As such, a strong sense of engineering identity is marked by a deepening commitment to pursue a career in engineering." (Meyers, Silliman, Ohland, Pawley, &Smith, 2012) despite its coherent complexity.