This is a postmortem regarding a mandatory class I took at my University: MAC0102 - Paths in the Bachelor of Computer Science. The objective of the course is to help second-year students map their academic trajectories inside the Institute.

My career plan before entering college

I already had in mind I wanted to work with offensive cybersecurity, both as a technical researcher and a organizational leader. Joining IMEsec and now leading it as president felt necessary. But I was unsure which specific modules would actually compile towards this goal.

The classes themselves

Each class was ministered by a different professor. Due to the USP strikes earlier this semester I had just a few, so I basically just learned about Theoretical Computer, which my Institute heavily privileges, and hardly about the rest. I do not really mind it, though. Despite that, we do not lack in excellent researchers in Software Systems, which are fundamental for… getting a job, probably. Yes, I would like to work, thank you very much. Maybe as a SWE, probably as a Security Researcher. Those roles essentialy overlap.

Alas, cybersecurity

It turns out not knowing is a vulnerability in itself.

• When reverse engineering a binary with a database, you have to understand SQL architecture.
• When exploiting a cryptography algorithm, you have to get elliptic curves.
• When auditing a smart contract, you have to parse its linear optimization models

So the more you know the better. And the better you are at learning, also the better. I want to learn how to learn better, better. Definitely the core primitive of a Security Researcher.

The study plan

I will attempt to follow the Theoretical Computer Science track, picking some interesting (and fundamental) Software System classes as well. I want to melt my brain with MAC0315 - Linear Optimization and MAC0336 - Cryptography for Data Security, while putting the theory to practise at courses such as MAC0470 - Free and Open Source Software Development. I am somewhat uninterested in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, albeit I will work with pure logics.