At Horne Cyber, I performed penetration testing on client’s external and internal subnets. Along with this, there were other services we offered that I helped out with such as social engineering through phishing emails and phone calls. I helped write scripts to help automate things and test vulnerabilities. I also helped work on establishing more services to offer our clients, using previous skills like digital forensics, reverse engineering, etc. This role was a great experience because it was my first offensive security role and it taught me what I needed to learn, and where I needed to be in order to succeed in the industry.

My first security position was at NSPARC as a junior security operations center (SOC) analyst. I was in charge of using the tools we had to create plans to help us monitor the status of our assets. During my time at NSPARC I got to work with many security tools and interact with security vendors, in order to find the best solution that aligned with the business. One of my favorite projects that I led was creating a secure development workflow for our developers.This included a lot of automation and integration with the security team’s tools as well as the development team’s tools to keep things moving and have security checks throughout the development process. Another project that I enjoyed was helping plan the first CTF in Memphis, which was sponsored by NSPARC and ServiceMaster. The first CTF we hosted had about 50 people in person and was a big success. The second year we held it all online and had a little over 350 people, even with it being during work times (Friday at 8am - 4pm). Both CTFs were a blast, and I hope that I get to help plan more in the future.

At the beginning of my senior year of college I took an Intro to Web App Penetration Testing class and absolutely loved it. The reason I started going down the security path was actually because of this class. This class taught me to think in a way that I’ve never thought about, and it had a competitive aspect to it with the CTF competitions that I fell in love with it right away. During my time at the class, I participated in a University CTF and did well enough to earn a scholarship from Facebook to go to Blackhat and Defcon in 2018. I also did well enough in the class where CodePath asked me to teach it the following semester, and ended up helping teach the course for the next three semesters. During this time, I furthered my soft skills such as presenting technical information, breaking down complex topics, and interacting with higher ups about the status of the class. Teaching was a reward in itself, but we were also rewarded with Facebook scholarships to go to Black Hat, DEF CON, and Enigma Conferences.

During my time as an undergrad student at Mississippi State University I worked as a full stack developer for the Extension Service. It was a great time and really helped me improve my web development skills. One of the projects that I was proud of was helping to convert all of our iOS and Android apps into a hybrid app with Ionic4. The reasoning behind this was that we had a lot of apps that needed updating, and we did not have the manpower to keep all our apps updated on both platforms and continue developing new apps. This taught me a lot about hybrid app development and javascript frameworks.

At International Paper (IP) I worked on the Connectivity Solutions team where we were tasked with sending over 18 millions documents a month throughout IP’s internal systems and their 800 business partners. Each document that was sent used a workflow in order to understand the format of the document, where it needs to go, how it needs to be converted, and much more in order to send the information. There are thousands of workflows that are built to be able to send these documents, and that’s where the project I was working on came into play. I was on the team as a full stack developer to help build a system that would allow them to create new workflows in a standardized way. This had the benefit of improving business responsiveness, simplifying development effort, and reducing operations costs. My main task was to display and build the UI into something that was intuitive and worked with the backend. I got to work on middleware by developing webMethod flows to interact with the backend that was built around this framework. I learned a great deal about UI, writing clean code, and thinking about how the code will be managed and possible functionality that would be added in the future. This is also my first real project so I got to experience project planning and hitting a deadline. Not only did I learn all of these skills, but I had a great time getting to meet all of my colleagues and meeting and getting to talk to the CEO himself!

At Hilton I worked with the GRO (Global Revenue Optimization) team which used an automated system to predict the best prices of hotel rates for specific hotels on different days. I worked as a SQL programmer to create queries and display the data to the team in the most efficient way. During my internship I worked on about 9 projects all focused around auto generating reports for the team to look at. The most important ones I worked on helped save the team $4,000 a month. This experience not only taught me hard skills such as SQL programming and database design, but also insight into the business side of things.