--Originally published at Mental Droppings of a Tired Student
For our second session, we had guest speakers come in and talk to us about different experiences they have had in their careers, predominantly with a focus on hacking and security of course.
Maggie shared with us her experience speaking in front of 2000+ people at Defcon about her studies regarding GFCIs, disabling hairdryers using signals from a walkie-talkie. She shared with us how she got her internship at Intel, how she worked with amazing people and how she was fortunate enough to transition to a job in the US under Intel as well. She even shared a bit of humorous personal experiences that related to her work and inspired her to continue to work on what she loved.
The only fault I found in her talk was that it was hard for me to relate, her story seemed like a fairy tale and I’m sitting over here like “wow it must be cool to have your life together”. So I started thinking, why would the teacher ask us to stand up and scream “It’s okay to fail”, and follow it up with a story of success?
In the q&a session, I decided to take the opportunity to ask her to share a story of failure, so that an underachiever such as myself could relate. I think my delivery of such request came off a little more coarse than I intended. It wasn’t my intention to come off as such a Debbie downer, but it kind of comes natural to me. Hopefully my question wasn’t as memorable.
In response to my request she spoke about how it’s okay to feel like a failure because it means you are constantly improving and shows your will to keep learning and bettering yourself. I had never thought
I saw her presentation at Defcon22 at Youtube. I really liked it, she did amazing and the crowed seemed to like her as well. She spoke fondly of Mexico and was represented like a boss.
