I have a graduated from
UC Berkeley with a B.A. in Analytics!
Just like that, my time at UC Berkeley comes to a close. It's had many ups and downs, but I'm glad I did it. There is a lot I can say about it from the classes I took, the friends I made, and the projects I worked on but I'm hoping this will be just a brief blog post recapping some of the most notable things.
What the heck is a B.A. Analytics?
Honestly this is the most common question I get even from my classmates and friends at Berkeley. When I first enrolled, it was called Operations Research & Management Science or ORMS, it had a name change a little over a year ago (around the end of 2024). It's a major in the Industrial Engineering and Operations Research department which resides in the College of Engineering, despite this the major Analytics is under the College of Letters and Science, and is not a B.S. like IEOR is. That said, the two majors IEOR and Analytics are sister majors, and all of my major related classes were IEOR classes and the only real difference between the two majors is a handful of physics classes. Aside from that, it's a lot of statistical modeling, probability, machine learning, and a little bit of industrial design.
So why cybersecurity?
I actually remember taking a single cybersecurity class at De Anza College, the community college I attended before transferring to Berkeley. It was called Ethical Hacking and I took it probably a year before transferring in 2022, and it mostly had us going through virtual machines in the web browser and doing basic tasks like updating firewall rules, changing group policies, patching basic vulnerabilities, it was actually a lot of fun. In retrospect, I wish I had been more interested in it then as I am now, I would've started my cybersecurity journey as a sophomore instead of halfway through my junior year of university.
Around the spring of 2024 I was invited to a general meeting for BERKE1337 by my good friend Adrian who I had met at a different info-session on campus. A large part of his identity as I would come to learn was about cybersecurity and was the best person to talk about this sort of thing. From then on, I spent the majority of time outside of class and more time in class than I would like to admit learning cybersecurity through doing various CTF gyms as well as my own explorations. This all culminated in the summer of 2024 where I started my homelab and the site you're reading this blog post on. Learning the networking required to self-host and the skills to manage a server were great ways to build my skills up. Additionally, that same summer I earned my CompTIA Security+ certification, a nice broad cybersecurity certificate which also taught me a lot of concepts and methods I would otherwise not have the opportunity to learn in Berkeley.
This brings me to my next point, which is the distinction between my formal education and my informal education. UC Berkeley has no undergraduate program for cybersecurity, there are some undergraduate courses and security related classes, but not a complete program to earn a cybersecurity degree, just computer science. My education as it relates to cybersecurity in a formal class setting was limited to my involvement with the UC Berkeley Cybersecurity Clinic, where I spent two semesters as a consultant aiding non-profits with their cybersecurity needs. This was a less technical, more policy based approach to cybersecurity but helped in covering my bases with what policy work in cyber looked like. I ended up helping write a publication which ended up on the Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity's white pages titled "Securing Mutual Aid: Cybersecurity Practices and Design Principles for Financial Technology". Doing the research alone had me learn much about financial technologies including cryptocurrencies which once again helped me become well versed on the topic and built confidence in my ability to consult on the matter.
Informally, there was BERKE1337, my cybersecurity club which I ultimately became the president of in my last semester. This club to me was the best way for me to learn cybersecurity, as opportunities to learn and show off my skills came by on the regular. In addition to numerous respectable competition showings, I also architected and created the club's lab network called 1337NET. Learning from my homelab, I was able to design and implement a sophisticated, stable, and expandable lab network aimed to further the educational opportunity of club members as well as being a fun project for people to come together and work on. And although my time as it's systems administrator came and went, I'm still proud of the work that I did and I hope others in the future who maintain it will have as much fun with it as I had building it.
Being at the Open Computing Facility
The Open Computing Facility was the place I decided was the best place to hang out and talk to other people interested in computer science and infrastructure. In the Fall semester of 2024 I was trying to find a project to work on, something new which didn't require much prerequisite knowledge to start on. In the middle of the computer lab was a television which showed the status of each computer in the lab, simply whether it was on or off. Since the OCF rebuild was under way and we were switching from Debian to NixOS, the functionality of the original labmap was lost and it was showing improper information. Additionally because the labmap was created in a unique way, it was difficult to maintain without owning Photoshop of all things. At that point I decided to rewrite the labmap as the labmap2, this time it would actually work, it would be easy to maintain, it would have penguins walking around showing the logged in status of all the machines and it would be written in Godot. So, I spent the semester writing this project and all it's features and by the end of the semester it was running on my own site. It would only be a year later at the beginning of the Fall 2025 semester that the then site manager Sophie (also a good friend of mine) would take interest in the project and want to help me deploy it. Now it runs 24/7 in the lab, and you can see it too at this link.
I spent many nights at the OCF talking with all my friends, hanging out working on projects, and totally not getting any work done. I really appreciate the community that I found myself in and enjoyed being there whenever I could, and I am proud to have been on the board of directors in my last semester.
Post Berkeley
As of now, I am continuing my role as security researcher and maintainer for the Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity while looking for a full-time job in a field closely related to my skills. Those fields include DevOps roles, security engineering, cybersecurity analyst roles, and so on. In the mean time, I'm working on building my skills up through some exploratory projects in Rust which I'm trying to make my go-to language of choice. I'm also working on more infrastructure projects back on my homelab which recently got renovated. With computer hardware going up in price as of late it's hard to say when it will become fully fleshed out as I hoping, but when it does come together I will definitely be sharing more information about it. I also got a new laptop, a Framework 13, which will be replacing my old Lenovo Flex 5 which has served me since the first year of high school. Goodnight sweet prince.
If you're hiring for cybersecurity roles (SOC analyst, engineering, or consultant) send me a message via my contacts page. I'm looking for positions in the Bay Area but am flexible for relocation depending on the opportunity.
Thank you for reading!