Childhood Veterinary Dreams

When I was a kid, I never wavered: I was going to be a veterinarian. I watched Emergency Vets religiously, and unlike most kids, I didn’t flinch at the uncensored surgeries. I leaned in. The blood, the organs, the stitches. I found it all fascinating.

When I was a teenager, I even shadowed my old dog’s vet for a day. That’s when I got the “real vet life” moment: the glamorous task of expressing anal glands. Most people would’ve run out the door, but I stayed. That day taught me something about myself: I could handle the messy parts of important work.

But as much as I loved animals, I eventually realized the sheer amount of schooling required to become a vet wasn’t realistic for me. It was my first major pivot.

From Design Dreams to Debugging Bugs

Once I set veterinary medicine aside, I tried to pivot to graphic design. I loved being creative, and design felt like a career that would let me mix creativity and technology. But I quickly ran into a wall: my art skills weren’t strong enough to build the kind of portfolio design programs wanted.

So I made another pivot this time toward computers.

That led me into programming, where I dove into databases, data structures, and eventually C++. Pointers almost broke me (like they do for plenty of people), but I stuck with it. I camped in my professor’s office hours, leaned on my online programmer friends, and eventually had my “lightbulb” moment. (Years later, flying my first ILS approaches in Microsoft Flight Simulator reminded me of that same feeling but that is a story for another time. Stay tuned.)

Programming gave me a new identity but one that I’ve always had: someone who could see systems, not just single problems.

The QA Crunch: Learning the Unglamorous Side of “Cool” Jobs

My programming degree opened doors into QA work. One of my most memorable stints was testing Call of Duty. Sounds glamorous, right? Friends thought it meant playing games all day. Which is true but also in reality, it meant long overtime hours and grinding through endless lists of bugs, running the same tests over and over until my eyes blurred.

It wasn’t glamorous. But I stuck with it, and I learned something important: even the “coolest” industries have unglamorous work that absolutely has to get done. If you can’t stomach the grind, you can’t be part of the team.

That lesson would come in handy later.

The IT Desk Chaos

After QA, I found myself working the IT Desk at my college. If QA was monotonous, the IT Desk was the opposite: chaotic. Laptop returns and handouts. Tickets piling up. Endless “my Wi-Fi isn’t working” calls.

The pace was brutal, but it gave me something QA hadn’t: patience with people. I learned how to stay calm when things got messy and how to solve problems under pressure when everyone was looking at me.

That’s when I realized that I wasn’t just learning technical skills. I was learning how to balance the technical with the human.

The Scenic Route Lands in Cyber

Looking back, my path doesn’t look like a straight line. Vet → Design → Programming → QA → IT → Cyber. But I’ve started to see the thread that ties it together: every stop taught me persistence, systems thinking, and the ability to handle the messy parts of a field.

  • Veterinary dream → taught me grit and empathy.
  • Graphic design detour → gave me creativity and communication skills.
  • Programming → built my systems mindset.
  • QA crunch → showed me how to grind through tedious, essential work.
  • IT chaos → sharpened my people skills under pressure.

Now in cybersecurity and especially as I pursue my interest in aviation cyber. I see how all of those experiences matter. Aviation systems are messy. Cybersecurity regulations are messy. Logs and compliance frameworks are messy. But I don’t flinch when things get complicated.

In fact, I lean in.

Why I Wouldn’t Trade the Scenic Route

For a long time, I thought my path was “unfocused.” I envied people who picked one major, one career path, and stuck with it from day one. But the more I’ve grown, the more I’ve realized: the scenic route gave me skills and perspective a straight line never could.

It gave me:

  • Curiosity that doesn’t back down when things get complicated.
  • Persistence when the work isn’t glamorous.
  • Creativity from design that still helps me today (yes, even in building this website).
  • Systems thinking that ties tech, people, and business together.

And that’s why I wouldn’t trade it. Because cybersecurity, especially aviation cyber isn’t just about coding or compliance. It’s about people, messy systems, and persistence. And my scenic route has prepared me for exactly that.