Finale

Hello everyone, and welcome to my last post where I work on my project's research section. The majority of this week was focused on my power point presentation which required me to finish up the rest of my research as soon as possible. All that was left for me to do was to analyze your answers to the survey and see what I can use in regards to my presentation. It is still astonishing to know that 154 people took my survey which was much more than I anticipated. I ended up having to pay money because Survey Monkey would only let me see 100 of your answers. I call it an investment for my future.

After reading through your answers on the survey, I expected most of what you said. Some questions were chosen specifically to add validity to my argument; others were chosen because I truly wanted to see what people did or thought regarding a specific topic. For example, one question that the people answered interestingly was about how to save passwords, or more specifically, what you did to store your password. The answers were pretty much evenly spread across all possible answers which gives me the perfect opportunity to answer how to best secure passwords. Of course, I'm not going to answer you right now, but in my presentation I will. Another interesting correlation I found was that time spent online does not affect one's knowledge of general computer security whether people answered that their work required them to be online all the time or very little. 

With presentations just around the corner, I find myself thinking much more about my approach to explaining my research. Going through each individual slide and organizing it concerning not only the audience's ability to follow what's on screen, but also my research's timeline put my project in a new perspective. I really was able to see how much potential my research has in terms of audience impact. There are so many ways I can explain computer security to people that making an impact will be fairly easy as long as I explain things properly. This gives me a ton of freedom when creating my slides, so I can explore and focus my time on making it enjoyable and entertaining. I don't want people to see a rushed 15 minute presentation where the audience barely has time to really think about what I'm saying. I want people to walk out actually thinking that my presentation was really cool and interesting and they will immediately change their computer habits.

Anyways, that’s it for this week guys. I want to give a huge thanks to everyone who has joined me in my journey so far and I hope to see this through to the end with you as well. As always, this is Adam signing off.

Networking

Hello everyone and welcome to my week 9 blog post. We are so close to the end of our blogs. I’m not sure about you, but it feels like we just started last week, but I digress.  Onto the main point of this week’s blog, it turned out to be a great opportunity for me regarding networking. I would like to give a special thanks to Cyndy Romagnolo for giving me this opportunity. Not only has it confirmed what my research has been leading towards, but also allowed me to meet some fantastic people in the field of cyber-security.

Ms. Romagnolo sent me an email after taking my survey inviting me to a meeting at Fidelity targeted at their clients that talked about personal security online. She said that my research sounded exactly like what this one person had been working on, John O’Conner, the EVP, executive vice president, of Fidelity Wealth Management.  Attached was a paper from their work and in it were some conclusions that I had also come to conclude, pretty much verbatim. I’ll attach it at the bottom of my post. You should read it. It contains a bunch of useful information that you will also find is really close to what I have been talking about. It was super reassuring when I talked to him about my research and was able to see the correlations between his and mine. Not only that, seeing him present gave me plenty of ideas for my presentation. I was super nervous going into this meeting. I had no clue how big this was going to be or how serious this meeting was. I mean me a simple high-schooler at such a big meeting. Impossible.  In addition to all of this, I managed to talk to a special guest, an ex-FBI guy named Greg who I connected with because of my NSA internship.  As you can probably tell, I gained a lot of useful insight and knowledge about my research as well as managed to do some great networking. So, again, I would like to give a special thanks to Ms. Romagnolo for inviting me to this meeting. It was super useful and I will carry with it the networking and knowledge that I gained for the rest of my career.

Now, I would also like to thank everyone for the overwhelming response I received on my surveys. Everyone who praised it in the comments thank you. I really hope it was a great survey for you to take. That is it for this week, and I look forward to my final post coming up. This is Adam Walker, signing off.

Here is the link to John's paper: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0uSQfxphinnbmxlcUVjQWtvcFE/view?usp=sharing