HenryHill

The first time I understood what real-world security actually looked like, I was standing in the most chaotic server room I had ever seen: cables everywhere, systems unlabeled, years of quick work stacked on top of each other. In that room, a question unsettled me in a way I still carry: how many systems do we trust are only “secure” because no one has looked closely enough?

That question sent me to HackUCF, where an attack-and-defend competition called the Horse Plinko Cyber Challenge lit the match. I had a lot to learn, but I was hooked. The patience, the lateral thinking, the satisfaction of finding the crack that had gone under the radar.

An internship at B2 Solutions sharpened that instinct against real enterprise environments. A homelab built from my apartment with a MikroTik firewall, Cisco switch, VLANs, Splunk, Wireshark, and more. It afforded me the space to practice and learn with no consequences, where the only goal is understanding. A semester studying Cloud Computing and IoT in Zurich broadened the frame further.

Studying for the CompTIA Security+ felt like finally reading the manual for something I had been operating on intuition. The concepts connected, the architecture of the discipline snapped into focus, and I closed my study materials one morning not just to pass, but to go further.

That ambition has a next chapter. I’m joining Deloitte as a Solutions Analyst — stepping into one of the most complex enterprise environments in the world, where the scale of the problems matches the depth of preparation I’ve been building toward.

And I’m not stopping there. I’ve been accepted into Northeastern's Master of Science in Cybersecurity program, moving from practitioner to architect, from closing individual gaps to understanding the structural conditions that create them. The questions that have driven me this far are about to get a lot more interesting.