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