Embarking on my Blog

I struggled a bit in deciding how I wanted to approach my first attempt at blogging before finally pulling the trigger. Considering I wanted to make this a security oriented blog I hit a somewhat important obstacle, experience. After I mulled it over for a while I decided that was more of a mental obstacle than anything and decided to contribute in whatever way I can and map out the beginning of my journey into a young and exciting new field.

This being said I should probably introduce myself. My name is Matt Johansen and I'm 21 years old and just graduated from Adelphi University in Garden City New York with a BS in Computer Science and a minor in Mathematics. I am an only child born and raised on Long Island who has as much IT experience as a 21 year old can have as my first job was the sole student tech for my high school's school district. From there I worked at Adelphi University, also as a student tech, and soon was promoted to one of four head student techs and received a ton of customer service experience as I was the guy everybody that lived on campus recognized as the "computer guy" who helped them in their dorms. This past summer I worked at Arrow Electronics as a Data Security Analyst on a team of 5 managing an Active Directory environment of over 12,000 employees internationally. During that summer internship I proved myself enough for them to ask me to come on part time while finishing my final semester at school and hopefully brought on full time when I graduated. Unfortunately, the economy hit home and Arrow Electronics was forced to lay off over 70 IT employees in a very short period of time, a group I was included in.

Okay that is my brief synopsis of my brief career. To start off on my blogging adventure I decided to discuss part of the reason my interest in entering this field was reinvigorated, a semester long special topics senior seminar with Kees Leune on Computer Security. Over the next few weeks I will be summing up my experiences in this class which were very exciting and while some of the information might not be new to all of you hopefully I will make it an interesting read in how the class was organized and what topics we covered. Stay tuned!