I had my first exposure to cybersecurity 14 years ago – when I first saw the Watch Dogs trailer at E3 2012.

I remember this was the first game that truly excited me, but I wasn’t sure exactly what it was that stood out to me. It may have been the idea of controlling an entire city from your phone which I had never seen as a feature in any other mainstream game. Remotely controlling vehicles, hacking lights, and causing traffic pile-ups by hacking traffic lights was an incredibly exciting concept and something that ended up becoming a reality written about just a few years later.

As I got older, I played through the remaining Watch Dogs games in the series (including Legion – although I like to pretend that one didn’t exist) and came to enjoy them thoroughly.

Once I turned 18 and my time at sixth form was coming to an end, I was faced with a few options: university or the world of work. I was never going to go into work right out of sixth form, and so university was going to be my next step. Had a different avenue not become available, I would have gone on to study Computer Science at Northumbria University.

Three months before the end of sixth form, an opportunity in the form of a degree apprenticeship appeared at one of the UK’s top banks, offering a Level 6 degree in Digital & Technology Solutions (also known as a DTS degree). I had to go for it.

I went through a few stages of interviews and eventually I got the job. I spent some time in a role completely different to cybersecurity as the members of our apprentice cohort were assigned roles and teams at random, but after a one-year long placement at the team I was originally in, I asked my manager if I could try a new team – the software engineering team.

When the placement opportunity with the software development team fell through, the door to joining the cybersecurity team was opened up for me and I’m grateful that it did. I’ve now spent over 2 years in the cybersecurity field and I’ve learned so much.

I’m hoping I’ll get to share more of that here on my blog.

Thanks for reading.

-J