Speaker: Nikolas Dutra
What were you up to in terms of your career/education before the bootcamp - and what made you decide it was time for a change of pace?
Nikolas Dutra: Hi, my name is Nikolas Dutra and I'm going to be a part of Level Effect's Cyber Defense Analyst Bootcamp in the fall of 2022. I just recently separated from the military from the army to be exact and since I separated, I've been doing everything I can to learn about cybersecurity and how I can be successful in the industry. I already have a bachelor's degree in accounting, but I'm trying to pivot into cybersecurity because it's something that is really interesting to me. One of these, my weaknesses that I've identified is that I lack a lot of the hard skills of actually doing a cybersecurity job and what the daily tasks are for doing a cybersecurity job. Um one of the great parts about this bootcamp is that they focus extremely on the hands-on and the actual practical tasks that you would need to do as a cybersecurity professional and that's what really drew me in to choosing Level Effect as my learning bootcamp
Why did you choose to attend Level Effect’s bootcamp over the others out there?
Nikolas Dutra: I spent a lot of time researching bootcamps and other training venues for cybersecurity, trying to like kind of find that diamond in the rough or the one that actually was legit and was gonna give me the best training and the best education that I could possibly get and I would say it wasn't until I joined the VetSec community and looked at their resources and they were only offering like two bootcamps and one of them was Level Effect's and of course there's also some of Level Effect's founders in the VetSec community itself and so as I started going into and researching Level Effect, I was blown away by what their breadth of knowledge, the instructors and the program itself. Um everything was about, it was ringing true to me that like, hey this is an actual program, this is people that care about the content and the students behind it and then I started reaching out to past students of the program and everyone I talked to had nothing but good things to say about it. And it got me really excited about the Level Effect Cyber Defense Analyst Bootcamp and made me really want to be a part of it. I felt like since one of my weaknesses was hard skills and this bootcamp almost all of it is all hands on practical, practical tasks and practical learning, this was a perfect fit for what I wanted and I felt like I could trust this bootcamp and the instructors behind it to give me the best possible product and for me to come away being a better cybersecurity professional because of it.
What are you most excited about as you begin the bootcamp?
Nikolas Dutra: What I'm most excited about as I start this bootcamp is all the practical exercises and the application of the knowledge that we're gonna be getting, actually doing a lot of real-world tasks and processes that you would do as a cybersecurity professional, just actually getting your hands dirty, learning what you actually need to do versus just a theory of things and the surface level book answers of you know what you would do in certain situations, just actually doing the task and actually performing what you need to perform as a cybersecurity professional is what I'm most excited about. But also this is like my de facto beginning of my cybersecurity career, so I'm super excited for that. It's a huge pivot for me and I just can't wait to get started.
