Above image represents how I feel almost 4 years into my CS degree, after a grueling fall term so far (mainly due to Defense Against the Dark Arts).
Senior Software Engineering (CS-461)
The first term of my Senior Software Engineering Project class (461) has been a good experience overall, and much less intense than I had expected it to be. Some things that I think have contributed most to this are as follows:
- An awesome and approachable hands-on professor.
- A well designed and thought out course.
- Building a CyberSecurity related project that I am somewhat passionate about.
- A solid and diverse project group that each brings a unique set of skills to the table.
- Likely the fact that it is not an industry partnered project, so probably not as intense as those can be.
- The first term in this course sequence being more about planning and design than actual building.
These factors, along with others, have provided a good experience with 461, and looking back on hearing some horror stories about the difficulty of the sequence from some past students, I wish I wouldn’t have spent so much time in fear and worry about this course.
Defense Against the Dark Arts (CS-373)
As you can maybe guess by now, this hasn’t exactly been the case for CS373. I will attempt to focus on the positive here for this course, as there is plenty of that. The course it not what I expected after taking my previous and first cybersecurity course last term in CS370. We are covering many different areas that may or may not have to do with security.
One takeaway so far has been that this class could likely be classified as a low-level systems class. The reason I say this is because the majority of our weekly labs and homework have been working in a virtual environment, whether that we a Kali Linux of some Windows OS variation, and we are dealing with a heavy amount of both assembly and operating systems stuff. Some major benefits here have been getting better with systems overall, not being so dependent on my local machine and it’s tools, and getting a TON of terminal experience. I view these all as important skills to improve on, and am doing my best to focus on the positives here.
For our final few weeks in 373, we have some higher-level concepts to focus on, such as network and firewall areas. The exception to this being in week 7 we will be using actual hardware that we ordered for a lab, so that should get interesting. Hopefully in a few weeks I can say I made it through the other side of this challenging course as a more experienced cybersecurity focused CS major with another couple notches on my belt.