At Journey's End, a Reflection on its Beginning

During May 8-13, 2024, I hit a number of milestones ending my journey to obtain a Master's degree in Cybersecurity Management from Washington University in St. Louis. May 8, 2024, is the day my degree was conferred and the date that will appear on my diploma. On May 11, I attended the McKelvey School of Engineering Recognition Ceremony, and on May 13, I attended the All-Campus Commencement Ceremony. 

After reaching this goal, I spent some time reflecting on how the journey began. In October 2018, I attended a celebration of Cybersecurity month at Mastercard, and after listening to an engaging guest speaker, Dr. Jon Brickey announced a new partnership with WashU. Employees accepted into the program were earning a graduate certificate and they had the option to continue after that and earn a master's degree. The classes were meeting at Mastercard, and the company was paying tuition and fees, including textbooks. I spoke to Dr. Brickey after the event to find out how I could be a part of this program. I discovered the first cohort was already underway, and it was recommended that I take the classes in order instead of joining the cohort mid program, so I applied for the second cohort. For my application, I had to write a Statement of Purpose, similar to the personal essay sometimes required when applying for an undergrad program. 

I remember thinking that I might not get in, and that my SOP needed to be attention getting and interesting because this was WashU. When I was in high school, WashU was one of the schools that recruited me, but one of the best schools for journalism was just 100 miles away from home in the opposite direction. As I completed my application, I wondered if I would be good enough for WashU now as a graduate student? It turned out I was, and I even accidentally applied for the degree program by clicking the wrong button on the online application form. It was a chance happenstance I ended up not regretting. I had fun looking back and reading my SOP!

Statement of Purpose (written in November 2018 and submitted with my application for a Master's Degree program in Cybersecurity Management at WashU):

I’ve been in love with Robert Redford since I was three years old. My parents and I were shopping at the Northwest Plaza mall when my parents decided to see the movie The Electric Horseman starring Redford and Jane Fonda. They were not sure I would sit through it, but when my mom checked on me, she found me sitting cross-legged on my seat, propping my head up with my hands, mesmerized by the image of Redford wearing a glowing cowboy costume riding on a horse down the Las Vegas strip. 

I have seen almost every one of Redford’s movies, and one of my favorites is Sneakers. In the opening scene, Redford and his team of misfits are paid to break into a bank in order to advise the bank on vulnerabilities in their security. The team goes on to obtain universal code-breaking technology and then risks their lives to make sure this technology cannot be used by nefarious actors, including our own government. I first saw this movie when I was in high school, and this first exposure to ethical hacking made an impression on me. 

Last month, in celebration of Cybersecurity month at Mastercard, I heard Frank Abagnale speak about his life running cons until he was 21 years old, and subsequent work as an FBI consultant. During his speech, he stated that it is not a question of “if” a security breach will happen, but “when,” and that security breaches occur either because an employee fails to do something that they should, or an employee does something that they should not. I believe the study of Cybersecurity Management is vital to any business, especially a business like Mastercard that handles a large amount of personal data and is confronted by cyber threats every day. If employees are ignorant of Cybersecurity Management, then the company becomes vulnerable to an attack. If an attack is successful, the company risks losing the public’s trust, and the brand suffers potentially irreparable damage. 

For example, KMOV-TV recently aired a story about the Walgreens website allowing anyone to look up purchases made by their customers using just their phone number. These purchases included sensitive items such as pregnancy tests and medications. Walgreens Boots Alliance, the parent company of its drugstores, employs over 400,000 people. It is unimaginable that at least one of them did not sound an alarm about this feature of their site, and that the problem was not discovered or rectified until a viewer called in a tip to a TV station. 

Frontline’s recent report on Facebook, The Facebook Dilemma, also illustrated a company’s carelessness regarding ways the company’s technology could be used for malfeasance. Facebook’s idealistic goal of being a force for good as it connects everyone around the globe created the climate where controls were not considered necessary. Common sense security could have prevented disreputable groups from manipulating the information posted on its newsfeeds to fight a propaganda war in countries around the globe. As a former journalist myself whose skills were honed by The Missouri Method that holds accuracy as one of its primary tenets, misleading and inaccurate information is one of my pet peeves. 

My Bachelor of Journalism degree and my experience at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and KMOV-TV ensured I was in the right place at the right time to obtain a position as a technical writer at Mastercard supported by LaunchCode’s apprenticeship program. Mastercard was looking for someone with journalism and writing experience who had a passion for technology, and I was the ideal match. I was converted to an employee after three months, and a little over a year after that, I was offered the position of software engineer. As a software engineer, I know the best defense against a security breach is me. If I am vigilant, and make sure to think of all the ways the bad actors could obtain and misuse access to the applications I am building, then I am safeguarding Mastercard’s assets and protecting public trust. If my application to Washington University’s Cybersecurity Management program is accepted, then I will leverage these critical skills and knowledge to continue safeguarding data at Mastercard.

The Girl Who Chased the Moon by Sarah Addison Allen
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A couple years ago, my book club read "Garden Spells" by Sarah Addison Allen and I really enjoyed it, so I decided to read her other novels. They did not disappoint. She combines rich characters, Southern small-town charm, romance, and magic so expertly that I have trouble putting the book down once I start reading. In "The Girl Who Chased the Moon," a teen moves in with her grandfather and discovers that some residents of the town are still holding grudges based on her mother's perceived wrong-doings. While she is coping with this, one of the adult characters is coping with the choices she made in her own past. It was a delightful read and I enjoyed it very much. I would recommend it.

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The Dressmaker of Khair Khana: Five Sisters, One Remarkable Family, and the Woman Who Risked Everything to Keep Them Safe by Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I probably would not have read this book if my book club hadn't picked it as our July selection. I thought it would take me longer to read because it's non-fiction and I wasn't expecting it to read like fiction. I read it in two days. I enjoyed it. There were some parts where I thought the time frame was a little inconsistent or incorrect, but overall, I enjoyed reading Kamila's story and the story of her sisters.



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The Girl Who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


The second book in Larsson's Millenium trilogy is even more thrilling than the first one! I had trouble putting it down because I couldn't wait to find out what was going to happen next. I had to start reading the final book as soon as I finished this one.



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Signing Their Lives Away: The Fame and Misfortune of the Men Who Signed the Declaration of Independence by Joseph D'Agnese

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


A fascinating read that details the lives of each signer of the Declaration of Independence. Some were privileged, some were self-made men and some were poor, but all laid their lives on the line with a stroke of their pens. I originally picked this up because I wanted to read what it had to say about my ancestor, John Witherspoon (one of the signers from New Jersey), but I enjoyed reading about the lives, gains and losses of all 56 signers and what a feat it was that they all voted unanimously for independence from Britain.



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The Last Child by John Hart

The Last Child by John Hart


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This was a great read and it kept me guessing. I had a hard time putting it down because I wanted to find out what was going to happen next.

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One reason why St. Louis is a great place to live

I recently read a departing Post-Dispatch staffer's blog complaining about what a horrible place St. Louis is and how he can't wait to move back to Boston because he's originally from New England and supposedly, everything is better in Boston. There were many fallacies in his logic and I don't want to specifically address them here, but Saturday night I thought of his blog post as I sat in the Tivoli theater watching the midnight showing of Back to the Future. I remember thinking that, at that moment, there was no place on earth I would rather be than in St. Louis.

As I watched the 1955 high school dance scene, I wondered if anyone else in the theater caught the irony that was occurring on screen when Marty McFly plays Johnny B. Goode while backstage injured guitarist Marvin Berry calls his cousin Chuck on the phone and says, "I think this is the new sound you've been looking for," and holds up the handset. Only in St. Louis can you sit in a theater watching that scene just a few short blocks away from Blueberry Hill's Duck Room where the legend himself performs to this day in a room named for him (although, sadly, not as often as he did 10 or so years ago) and where Johnnie Johnson's star and Berry's shines on the sidewalk outside. There is just so much history in this place known as the Gateway to the West.

The reason I wondered whether anyone else caught the irony was I noticed that by the looks of many moviegoers, some of them could have been seeing the film for the first time. In fact, I was the oldest person in the group of people I was with. Some of them hadn't even been born when the movie was first released and most of the rest of our group had been mere toddlers.

Among the other things I noticed while watching the movie was the fact that, in the beginning, Doc Brown says he plans to travel 25 years into the future. That would be 2010. It blew me away to think that Robert Zemeckis imagined that we would be driving flying cars by 2010! It made me want to see the second film again to see if any of his predictions regarding the future were accurate.

When the movie first started playing, I wasn't sure if I was going to enjoy it with everyone shouting out comments and applauding during certain scenes of the film. After all, I wasn't there to see The Rocky Horror Picture Show. But I ended up enjoying that part of it and found myself applauding and reacting right along with the crowd. It's been a long time since I laughed that hard watching anything.

Watching the movie also made me sad for times long gone. Several mentions were obsolete. Some faded away almost immediately after 1985 like Tab and Pepsi Free. Other fads took longer to die out like big hair, sleeveless jackets, stonewashed jeans. Some 24 years later, 1985 almost seems as simple and uncomplicated as 1955 did in 1985. Apparently, if you believe the movie, all a high schooler wanted was for his band to get a legitimate gig, his dad to get a backbone and stand up to his bully of a boss, and a Toyota four-wheel-drive pickup. It was a time when terrorists were Libyans driving a beat-up VW bus and when they get ready to use the grenade launcher, it was more of a joke than a reality. It was a time when you didn't have to pass through a metal detector in order to go to class and when Huey Lewis and the News and Van Halen were constantly on the radio. It was a time when cell phones weren't stuck to everyone's ears while they were driving down the highway and a time when no one had heard of the Internet or facebook or twitter. It was a time when a BlackBerry was still a fruit and reality TV was the evening news.

I couldn't even begin to guess what the people one or two generations behind me thought of the movie. How foreign a lot of it must have seemed to them, just like 1955 seemed to me when I first saw the movie as a pre-teen.

They don't make movies like that anymore and I was glad that I saw it again on the big screen. It was a worthwhile trip down memory lane and I almost regretted having to come back to the future.