Re: RE: Requesting Informational Interview

[Radmilo Racic <rracic () gmail com>]

> Not to disagree with the points that a person should really understand
> what they're doing; I'm disagreeing that you find that in academia.
> What I've seen from academia in general is a whole lot of theory and
> very little application. The one exception I would truly make here,
> and this is off of limited first hand experience would be
> Ruhr-Universität Bochum. I would've said the exact opposite, people
> with formal educations tend to lack basic comprehension of matters
> because by and large they did their course work and that was it;
> whereas self-taught people found their own motivation and thoroughly
> explored and *applied* the knowledge.

That's a bit of a generalization. You surely must be referring to the
undergrad-level -- if that is the case, I totally agree. However, the
story differs at the graduate level -- you basically ARE self-taught.
In fact, I (and most other security grad students) was involved in
numerous security projects that included writing buffer overflow
shellcode and attacking web servers, engineering a secure web server
from scratch (later to be scrutinized by a pen-test), modifying a
virtual machine to track the flow of confidential information. etc. In
addition, most grad students work on independent research projects
which usually culminate in conference and journal publications. The
amalgamation of knowledge gained from those projects is surely
helpful.

> Truthfully, after working at some of the top rated jobs in this
> industry, I'd have to say that probably somewhere around 30% of my
> competent colleagues had a formal education, or even one that's
> related (i.e. neel mehta & biology). When I do hire for security and
> looking at someones CV, I pretty much disregard most all security
> related training, and throw out CS degree'd applicants, I tend to look
> for electrical engineers as they've worked closer to what the subject
> matter is than any other subject.

Interesting observation. Good to know.

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