Hello there! My name is Ryan Holmes.
I am currently a student at Austin Community College in Austin, Texas. Where I am on a cybersecurity track.
In the future I want to be a cybersecurity officer in the United States Air Force, with my main focus being in the offensive field.
My interest in the cybersecurity profession started around five years ago. I had just joined a volunteer organization called Civil Air Patrol, which is a civilian axillary branch of the United States Air Force. One of the adult leaders had just started up a team for a competition called CyberPatriot, which is a competition designed to get youth interested in cybersecurity to help fill cybersecurity jobs created due to how much more computer-dependent the world is getting all the time.
Image #1: A picture of my CyberPatriot team's first year. Every year this team has gotten better and better in the competition and we are planning on making it into the National round this season. (I am on the right)
I've gone to multiple camps hosted by Civil Air Patrol instructed by professionals in the cybersecurity world. The first camp I went to was the Cyberspace Networking Course. In this course I learned the basics of creating a computer network. Such as what different parts of a network are (e.g. routers, switches, hosts, etc.), IP addresses and reading binary, subnetting networks, vlans, and much more.
The second camp I went to was the Cyberspace Advanced Administration Course. This course was focused around the administrative side of managing a network. We learned things such as creating a domain, creating a LAMP stack, encryption and encoding, etc.
The most recent camp that I have gone to was the Cyberspace Operations Fundamentals Course. In this course I was instructed by the 273rd cyber operations squadron in the U.S. Air Force. In this program I learned how to read packets on a network, how to use the tools that the Air Force uses for cybersecurity, and follow an operations plan for a mission. I scored higher on the final exam than anyone has in the twelve years of this camp's existence.
Image #2: an image of me receiving the honor graduate award at the Cybersecurity Operations Fundamentals Course.