“From Quality Control to Cybersecurity:
My Journey to Becoming a SOC Analyst as a CyberGirl Fellow”Odunola Ibrahim
CyberGirls fellow Odunola Ibrahim shares her inspiring journey into cybersecurity.
My journey into cybersecurity began while I was working as a Quality Control Analyst at a food manufacturing company. I started to look into skills I could acquire, as the job was low-paying and physically tasking. I started with Python programming, but it didn’t quite click for me. That was when I started to look into cybersecurity. I took a course on Udemy and learned about the Cyber Girls Fellowship program through a friend who sent me the flyer on Twitter.
The Cyber Girls Fellowship was a life-changing experience for me. I gained both soft and hard skills, including communication skills, interpersonal skills, critical thinking, and technical skills such as the use of security tools like Nmap, Nessus, burpsuite, and the deployment of cloud services.
Currently, I work as a SOC analyst in a company that provides cybersecurity as a service, and I am doing everything I can to maximize my learning process and excel at my job. My ultimate career goal is to work as a SOC engineer in a cloud environment, especially with AWS.
For women interested in pursuing a career in cybersecurity, my advice is simple: go for it! If I can do it with a science background, then you can do it too. My best advice for those
currently in the Fellowship is to hold on tight because it is going to be a long ride. There will be days when you are excited about the wealth of knowledge you are acquiring, while there will be days that all of that would be overwhelming. But if you grind your teeth and get it done, it will all be worth it!
