Year So Far — Part 2

19 Jul 2025

What’s this about?

Oftentimes I get so immersed in what I do, one thing after the other, I forget to take a step back and notice what I’ve accomplished. It’s important to do this from time to time, so when I feel down about not doing enough in moments of downtime, I have something to look at and go, “No, I am doing my best.”

This is one such list, for what I’ve been up to this year till now. Here’s a glimpse into the life of Sheikh, halfway through 2025.

The List, continued...

[Part 2 of 3]

Digital Nova Scotia — Skills For Hire: Cybersecurity

February I started a 16-week Cybersecurity course with Skills for Hire by Digital Nova Scotia. It was with this course that the ShiftKey course had a lot of overlap with, but that meant I could use one to consolidate the other. We had Pluralsight videos, weekly TA sessions, assignments, and career development webinars, all of which were super helpful.

The Pluralsight videos helped me understand a lot better how computer networking works, and what their weaknesses could be, as well as how to cover them. I also learned about risk management — since it’s impossible (or at least not feasible) to perfectly secure all aspects of a system, it makes sense to prioritize mitigating certain risks while accepting others and planning to work around them. I liked that there were a ton of hands-on components that I could try out, like log file analysis, cryptography, network monitoring, etc.

The program included a waiver for the ISC2 membership fees if we passed the ISC2 CC exam at the end of the course. More on that in a bit.

Convocation Ceremony

In May, SMU held the convocation ceremony for Jan 2025 graduates. I have always had little interest and faith in formal education, especially in the memorization-favouring system that we currently have, which was created to produce uniform-minded factory workers and not creative individuals prepared for modern society. And all that at the cost of my parents’ hard-earned money and my fleeting sanity. I find the whole ordeal utterly ridiculous and a prime waste of resources. I would not, had we a more favourable world for humans, but alas that is not the world we live in. Regardless, I graduated, and hopefully made my parents happy. That’s all that matters to me for this chapter.

It was definitely an interesting experience going up on stage and receiving the roll of paper that validated the four and some years of learning I just completed. Got some nice pictures taken, spent time with friends. I wish my parents could attend though; this was for them, after all.

PS: I don’t dislike university, in fact I believe all stages of education should have the level of freedom and agency that university gives us (and that universities should have more freedom, especially in letting us ditch unrelated electives). However I am an avid hater of mid-term and final exams. I am largely in favour of intermittent testing and practical assessments.

Just thought I should clarify. Moving on…

ISC2 CC Certification Exam

Second week of June, I sat for the ISC2 CC exam. ISC2, or International Information System Security Certification Consortium (you can see why I’ve been abbreviating it thus far and will continue going forward), is one of the world’s leading training organizations in the field of cybersecurity. The “Certified in Cybersecurity” (CC) certificate is their entry-level offering, which they’ve been giving away for quite a while now. The catch is that after you pass you have to pay the annual membership fee of 50 CAD, which is still way less than any other entry-level cybersecurity certifications that are worth doing (looking at you, CompTIA and Cisco).

The 4-month training from DNS Skills for Hire, as well as the ShiftKey Cybersecurity course, were greatly helpful for this exam. Thanks to those I barely had to study. I wanted to, but I only took one practice exam and barely passed that, then procrastinated till there was no time left to study. Then I just said Bismillah (in the name of Allah; Muslims say this before starting things) and went on to wing it.

It was fun, cuz the morning of exam day I got a call which woke me up, from the testing centre, saying someone cancelled their morning slot so I can come in earlier if I wanted to. I thought I might as well get it over with, since I don’t believe in studying right before exams (if I touch it, I will only recall what I just read and nothing else, which is why I’d rather not and keep it all equalized). Went to the place and the test was so intuitively easy, (likely thanks to the training/courses), I finished the 120 minute exam with 95 minutes remaining. I was afraid, though, since there were quite a few questions I just guessed the answer to; but I don’t like dwelling on a problem to boil my brain over something I may or may not know, so I just take a guess and move on to the next question.

After the test, the examiner handed me a paper saying I passed. I was pleasantly surprised cuz of how fast the evaluation was. I shouldn’t be, because it’s just MCQ with known answers, but it’s not as common as it should be. A few days later I got the official certificate online, which you can see here: ISC2 CC — Credly Badge

I don’t know what industry value this certificate holds, but I learned a lot — about IT, Networking, Cybersecurity, and more — in the process of getting it, so I consider this a great success.