I'm a fourth-year cybersecurity student at Seneca Polytechnic, graduating August 2027. I started the program in January 2024 after a long stretch of hospitality and trades work, because I wanted to do something where I'd actually be using my brain instead of just my back. I waited tables for almost a decade, ran a banquet hall as the General Manager for a few years after that, and had a renovations business on the side. Good work, good people, but I knew I wasn't going to want to keep doing it forever.
When I started the program I was pretty set on going into red teaming or pen testing. That's still interesting to me, but the more coursework I've gotten through, the more I think purple teaming makes more sense. I've done a decent amount of the blue side already at Seneca, deploying Wazuh, Suricata, Sysmon, and working through detection rules and adversary emulation alongside the offensive coursework. Being able to do both brings more value to a team than picking one side and ignoring the other.
- Coursework in social engineering, web app security methodology, and attack/defense fundamentals
- BSCP exam prep through PortSwigger Academy
- A Proxmox homelab running offline AI, automation projects, and a multi-zone lab I use for security testing
Co-op placement in penetration testing, security consulting, or detection engineering. Available for Fall 2026 and Winter 2027 co-op terms (September 2026 through April 2027).
Outside of security I try to keep busy learning new languages, both spoken and programming, and picking up gardening techniques. I also spend a lot of time on off-grid and resilient systems as side projects, mostly a hobby but it ends up overlapping with security more than you'd expect.