Years before I ever thought about a career change, I engaged and worked directly with an outside IT firm during a ransomware attack at the small law firm where I worked – giving them access to the server and systems they needed to start mitigation, then watching their forensic work trace the breach back to a single unsecured port. It stuck with me, but it would be years before it turned into anything more than curiosity.

The plan came later, when the firm closed and I found myself job hunting for the first time in years. I initially set my sights on software engineering and completed a full-stack program. But building the thing interested me a lot less than figuring out how someone would break the thing – so I pivoted again, this time toward cybersecurity, earned my CompTIA Security+ and Google Cybersecurity Certificates, and built a home SOC lab to get hands-on experience instead of just studying theory.