Building Confidence: Kelly’s First Step in the Future

It's kind of like a game in a sense. So you're defending your stuff while the hackers are trying to attack it. So what do you put in place to. That doesn't. So your stuff doesn't get compromised effect. I'd like to begin by acknowledging that this podcast is recorded on the unceded sovereign Boudre of the Wajjak Nungar people. We pay our respects to the elders past and present and extend that respect to all First Nation listeners today. Welcome to our Uni Prep Schools podcast series where we hear from students who have been taken this senior school pathway to university. I'm George and we're joined by Kelly. How you doing today Kelly? I'm very well thank you George yourself. Yeah pretty good. Final semester. Yeah final semester final year. How are we feeling? Are we excited, nervous? Feeling pretty good. I'm feeling pretty prepared for the industry given. Oh I'm in the cybersecurity field of things at the moment but I'm feeling pretty prepared for things. I do a lot of things outside of Uni as well so that's certainly helped. Perfect. So feeling pretty confident. And you're at the junior lock campus. Yes. Are there any places you'd like to go to? Like the library or any spots on the cafe that you like to make sense? Yeah typically I'll hang out with a couple of mates. We go to the Sock Room in building 18 and we'll all just hang out there and do assignments there and work on our own stuff and lean on each other if we need to in that sense. Like we don't understand a concept but otherwise we'll just go to cafe 6, have coffee or gum and boost juice or just hang out really. There's a boost juice on campus. Yeah. Wow. That is amazing. We need one. Do you know how fun? No. We'll start with sort of what you're starting at Uni and sort of why you wanted to do cyber security. Okay. So I am studying an undergraduate, Bachelor of Science in Cybersecurity specifically and I chose to do this because I've always had an interest in passion in computers even throughout my time in primary school. I used to pull computers apart, all laptops that we had at home and I used to just open them up and take the components off and mess around with it. It wasn't working after that. So, but as I like to get my hands, get familiar with the things I was working with and I started building PCs and I'm like I want to do a career in computers so I thought I could either program or do software development in computer science side of things or I can do cyber security and potentially break into things or defend the things or work with law enforcement and that really interested me. In primary school we were doing projects and oh no we weren't doing a protestful plan games this is years ago in like 2011, 2012. But that is sort of how you get used to the computer playing games or not even if the educational games, right? Yeah, cool math games. It's an education, yeah. The yeah, that was kind of my exposure to it. I used to always do a favorite stuff on the home computer. Definitely wasn't the culprit for a few viruses but yeah. One's you'll be able to fix now. Oh yeah, so it's pretty simple now looking back but we all start somewhere. We're going to learn somehow. So we'll make mistakes and yeah. Definitely. So you were mentioning the security aspect, the protection aspect of your degree. What interests you about that? Anything that's on the internet, that's public facing, say a website or anything that can be accessed by the public has to be protected, right? It needs to be secured otherwise you're going to have problems. There's all sorts happening all the time everywhere, all sorts of attacks going on and you need to put security controls in place to at least mitigate that, whether it be the likelihood of the impact. So what do you put in place to so that doesn't so your stuff doesn't get compromised effectively? Mm, sort of like us. I mean, obviously doing journalism for me, I didn't do media because my school didn't have media but we had drama and English and just purely for the writing purposes. They were very helpful and have definitely helped me further in my study. So looking to the future, is there sort of anything you want to achieve or sort of any career path you'd like to go down? Obviously it's very, very early but do you have any ideas? I was thinking about the law enforcement side of things. Otherwise there's the private side of things. So inside but there's quite a few different paths you can go down. So there's the sock analyst path, there's the offensive side so you can do pen testing or red teaming. I'm probably more geared towards the defensive side so that's not as blue-toming in side so I'm also leaning towards digital forensics. I've always had an interest in that. Well not always since I did the digital forensics you know I'm like oh this is really cool. I want to try and do this for a career path. Which year was that? Which year? That was second year. Second year first semester I think. Perfect. And that's been one of your favourites? Yeah, yeah it has been. That in the ethical hacking unit but yeah. Ethical hacking. Yeah. Pretty. How did your family view education was going to university something they expected encouraged? There were no, I don't think there was any expectation for us to go to uni necessarily but I think it was more so to as long as we're doing something that I suppose is worthwhile for our career or we're doing what makes us happy in that sense. So to go back to year 11, you're 12 and we're talking about uni prep. What inspired you to do uni prep? How did you hear about it? I wasn't, how did I hear about it? I was speaking with my career advisor at the time at my secondary school and I wasn't doing so well in year 11 with my subjects and I heard about what she mentioned that uni prep was a subject that was being introduced the following year for year 11's and 12's for the next year's year 11's. How was your year in year 11? That's, she explained to me that this is an option for students who weren't doing too well in that sense or just who wanted to accelerate their learning into a university pathway at EC and I heard about it and I'm like this sounds really good, I think I get a lot out of it because there was a fair few skills that I was lacking in that sense, academic writing, different things, research skills, I didn't really have that and I think that I thought at the time that uni prep would have been a really good opportunity to take up and pursue. Was there a lot of other students doing uni prep? Yeah, in my year group there were about maybe 20 other students, that's actually why they got it in there in the first place for our year at least. It wasn't supposed to be for our year group but because there was about a class of students who wanted to do it, the band exception for us and just got us in. So we ended up doing it in that year, no sorry, in year 12. So we applied for it at the end of year 11 and then did it uni prep all throughout year 12 along with our general courses and whatever else we were doing. And in the week prior to coming back to school for year 12, we also did a week of uni prep then. So yeah there were a few other students that were interested. So the demand pretty much made them go, right, let's do it. Pretty much, yeah. Did the idea of doing uni style assessments at school feel daunting or exciting? So when learning about what was for uni prep, what was expected in university, was there obviously what it means to get rid of, begin with, but was it slowly easy to understand what was expected for uni prep? Yeah, I think on the contrary, it was very structured, very logical and laid out and very easy to understand manner. And I think given, I think it was really good that we were exposed to that style of assessments because it got us prepared for the, I suppose, expectations of universities and what was expected for us and it kind of worked that we were supposed to do and what we should achieve I suppose. What advice would you give to your 10 to 12 students who are curious about uni prep schools? But I'm sure if it's for them. So, those students, I would say honestly, just give it a crack and go for it. I mean, you've got nothing to lose. If anything, you benefit a lot from the skills in research, writing, communication, problem solving and such. That a lot of people struggle to get during school. I remember I had that. I'd struggled with a lot of those things during high school and uni prep taught me a lot of that. And yeah, honestly, I say go for it. And you may also very much get a chance to go straight into uni after that. I had to write a, I think it was a three or four thousand word report. And yeah, I mean, I was, I wasn't initially thinking, I don't know how I'm going to do this. Well, what am I going to do? But I was like, I've never had to do a three or four thousand word report before. This is going to be interesting. So, that, I'm like, okay, let's do it. So, I would just go home, work on it and break things up logically, plan some things out and get certain things done by certain days. If you do a little bit every day or every couple days, then over the course of a week or so, you've gotten a fair bit done. One of the things that uni, I'm sure you're aware of this as well. But once you're done with an assessment, you always cross, cross reference it with the re-brick and see if your points or parts of the assignment align with the re-brick. Yeah, that helped me add a lot throughout uni prep. It really helped me understand what I could potentially improve on at uni. What's one study hack you discovered in uni prep that has made life easier in general? I would say starting early on things. So, when you get an assignment, just start on it. For me, I find starting assessments to be the hardest part. I don't know about anyone else, but starting something that you've never done, isn't the easiest, but once you start and get the ball rolling, it's a lot easier to just pick up from where you left off. I'm so glad I realized that early on in uni prep, because I've done that throughout my entire time at studying at ECU at uni. It saves me a lot. I guess it depends on how you learn. I'm a very visual learner after seeing things and math things out physically to understand it. I guess it'll depend, but always take a pen with you for one on the physical side of things. If you write stuff down, that helps me a lot, but also referencing guides. There was a referencing guide that we all had printed out. Referencing guides helps so much when you manually referencing. If you didn't do uni prep in high school, would you be in the position you are now? Absolutely not. I have had thoughts about this in the past, but yes, I would not be in this position if I didn't do uni prep. Thanks for joining us on today's episode of the uni prep schools podcast. I'm George, and we've been chatting to Kelly. Join us on the next episode as we explore more student journeys at ECU. [Music]