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My name is Marcel Lee and I'm a senior security researcher at Secure Works.

I wanted to do a lot of different things in my life and have done quite a few of them.

I had one year of double E in college and that definitely wasn't for me.

So at the time, like I had never in college and that definitely wasn't for me.

So at the time, like I had never even considered

like a career in computers because it just wasn't

something that I grew up with at all

and didn't have any concept you know of what a career in that field would look like so yeah but here I end up. I had a relative pass away and I was in charge of managing their estate and it was a bit complicated because there was like a household to you know empty and a house to sell and so on and so on and so forth and

but because I was getting some money from that,

I was able to like basically quit my full-time gig,

which was managing like capital projects

for a municipality, and focus on taking care of the estate and then getting into the cyber thing because I had a little bit of funds in flexibility.

The other thing that helped was I actually was part of a

grant program and I think it was through the county that I live in but it was

federally funded and this was just one of these things to like get workers

and re-skilled in cyber security.

So with that program, basically it paid for classes

at my local community college, which

has an excellent cyber program,

and also paid for like certification.

So the idea is that you would take a class, sit for a cert, take a class, sit for a cert.

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