My Journey and Backstory into the Cybersecurity Industry

The cybersecurity industry is a hard industry to join and be a part of these days. This morning as I sat down to drink my coffee, I got to thinking about so many things. Life really is about the journey, not the destination for me. So, today I wanted to share with you all about my cybersecurity journey and backstory into the industry. The real and sometimes vulnerable one. 

The biggest thing that has been screaming at me lately is the fact it’s 2024, and I graduated high school 20 years ago. I know I’ll soon start getting the mailers about my reunion, even though those closest to me know I likely won’t be attending. 

It’s not necessarily that I don’t want to, but rather revisiting that time in my life is no longer a need to. There is nothing from back then that will serve me in where my life led to and will lead to. The past has already been written, but tomorrow can always be a new beginning. 

The reality is when I went out into the world as a young (and sometimes dumb) adult. I had absolutely no concrete plans laid out for me. I had big dreams of moving out west back then. I wanted to go to UNLV and study forensics. That was my dream. And that never ended up happening. 

What happened instead was I took a gap year. In that gap year, I worked and worked. I knew I needed a better car to get me where I needed to go and I made that happen for me. Then my grandfather’s health started failing, and I knew my family needed me to step in for support. So, I took the easy route. 

I went to the local community college to start my academic journey. I thrived in classes around sociology and psychology. When I transferred to the larger university, my favorite courses surrounded criminal justice and technology. I once wrote a paper in class on what it’s like to experience prison and being an inmate. I told people it was a relative of mine. 

Little did they know the inmate experience I wrote about from a relative was the experiences of my own mother. My mother made a lot of her own mistakes in her life. But at the end of day she was still my mother, and I loved her even for her faults. Those faults, in turn, led me to live life differently, even today. And truthfully, that is a different story for another day that may or may not write about one day. 

When I had to declare a major at the university, I originally wanted to pursue information technology. But that also didn’t happen back then for me. I’ll never forget walking into the department to talk to someone about how to declare this as my major and the older male professor staring at me like I was lost. Why would some petite (at the time) blonde haired young lady want to pursue technology? She must be lost. That experience turned me away from that dream for nearly a decade and led me to pursue what I like to call a throw away degree, Sociology. 

The next near decade was a bit of a blur for me. I figured nobody really took me seriously. But looking back now, I realize I didn’t even take myself seriously. I never stepped into my own power with anything. I was just floating along doing what everyone else was telling me to do – get a job, make decent money, get married, and start a family. 

I did all of those things except start a family. Being a mother is something that was never in the cards for me. In the beginning, it was my ex, and I wanted to be more financially stable before starting a family. I grew up with low income beginnings and I wanted to ensure that my one day children would have a better life and opportunity than me. I worked for a lot of large companies back then. Macy’s, State Farm, Enterprise and more. I moved jobs about every year to year and a half because I somehow believed that more money meant more opportunity. Until I found myself lost in 2016. 

In all the roles I held over the years, one theme remained consistent. I was quick to pick up the technology. It was something that came so naturally to me. At Macy’s I learned and knew how to navigate the backend Mainframe and often would help my colleagues that struggled with tech to use it more effectively. 

At State Farm, I remember helping agencies with lower tier tech support needs on top of my regular role and responsibilities. It took years for that breakthrough aha moment to come to me. When I was at Enterprise at the time working from home (when it was a pipe dream for everybody) and I kept having system issues occasionally. Every time I called support, I already had pinpointed the issue, but because that wasn’t my job at the time, nobody actively listened to me. It wasn’t until I had a corrupt application that was escalated to a Tier 3 support person that someone finally asked me “did you tell the other person this was the issue?” I said yes, but they refused to listen to me. 

9 years I spent in the wrong jobs doing the best I could just to make money. To fulfill the expectations society had placed on me. I had enough of people not listening to me and enough of not listening to that inner calling. So I researched and talked to friends moving into technology roles themselves. This is ultimately what led me to security. 

My whole life before 2017 was me just being your average American Bare Minimum Barbie. In high school, I barely got by. The minimum to graduate was 2.0 GPA. I busted my ass my senior year to graduate with a 2.1. In college, the minimum to graduate was a 2.5, I passed with a 2.6. See, bare minimum barbie. Of course, I also now realize there was a lot of undiagnosed ADHD at play there too.

When I went back to school, there was something that changed in me. I was passing my classes with ease. Not because they were necessarily easy, but rather cybersecurity somehow came naturally to me. I changed jobs again in 2017 and the next few years were a chaotic whirlwind.

I got divorced. I had a major life altering surgery. I buried my mom and then later my granny. I had a lot of great upheaval when I stepped into that calling. Since 2017, it’s been a weird, emotional, and chaotic rollercoaster. COVID also played its own weird role in things too. Sometimes I still don’t know how I made it to today sitting here writing about all of this. In the more recent years, it’s somehow balanced out a bit for me. Everything truly comes full circle, eventually. 

I had a friend tell me the other day how time can be a thief. And it can be, but it is also a blessing. 20 years ago I had little to no plans for me, just dreams. Dreams that often never came to fruition for me. But one thing has completely remained consistent – my passion for technology and security.

I didn’t get that head start in technology in my 20s. My 30’s have been spent cleaning up all the mistakes I made in my 20s. I’d probably be running a team and making 6 figures already, but I’m not and I’ll likely never be doing such a thing. And that’s okay with me. Many times, I still feel I am behind the curve of peers and colleagues in the industry. I had a late start. But I had to find my own way and my own voice. 

When I started the Glam Techie 5 years ago, I had a dream with it. That dream was to talk about cybersecurity to the everyday person in a way that was most comfortable for me because the reality is it impacts them deeper than it does large companies. Companies and professionals today can argue and debate all day where they are falling short in security. The reality is no one understands its devastating impact until it’s the elderly person at the bank asking where all their money went because a cybercriminal stole their information from a data breach. 

The reality is cybersecurity is everyone’s responsibility. From enterprises down to the everyday folks like you and me. And that is what has been and will always be the goal here with the Glam Techie. I have often pondered the fact that a lot of the content I plan and want to publish is high  level. I know professionals that follow me here and on social media likely think this is too high level or generic info for them to read. I get it. To the pros, talking about what the dark web really looks like is boring. Because they already know. 

However, this blog has never been dreamed up to talk to other security people. There are plenty of those out there already. My goal has always been to talk with other security people, not to them. There are countless other publications out there the pros can follow that are likely more aligned with their expertise. That’s not what this site is about, nor who it’s for. It’s about helping the people that use technology daily without understanding the risks that come along with it until it’s too late. 

I wanted to take a moment to share my backstory with all of you. It’s the too long didn’t read (TL;DR) version of everything. Because if I sat here and wrote it all, I would not only start crying, but it would also take days to sift through. But it’s a story that I feel is important in sharing and one that has built me but doesn’t define me.

These trials and tribulations have been what has built me and the Glam Techie. I can write all day about cybersecurity for my clients and leverage my expertise, but this space will always and forever be my voice and my voice only. It’s a voice that I know is not for everybody, but it’s one that is there because there is likely somebody out there that needs to hear or read it.

It’s been a long road and a lot of hiccups, but my goal moving forward is to ensure that security is top of mind for everybody. I may have been late to the party and I am still moving slowly with everything. But that’s the beauty of an industry that is constantly evolving. We all are still learning. Oftentimes, that learning is sometimes daily. So, here’s to the next chapter of the Glam Techie.

As always, thank you for taking the time reading this post and being on this journey with me.
Until next time, stay safe out there and don’t click any unverified links! #cantphishme

– Amanda

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