I can say that I didn't do enough research when I took the plunge into the cyber field. I felt like my life was starting to drift into obscurity with stresses at work and I realized that I needed a change before things started to unravel faster than I could retighten my grip on, so I jumped at the opportunity I was told I could have at the end of a boot camp: More money, no more 60 + hour weeks, go at your own pace while you set aside 12 hours a week for study and labs, thousands of jobs waiting for you when you finish camp, a better quality of life all around- all for the low low price of $7,000, to quote Ol Colonel Sanders in the movie, 'The Waterboy,' "well folks, mama is wrong again!" My first class I learned that I was sold some false goods, "you need to set aside at least 24 to 25 hours a week to keep up with the lectures and labs!" Working 60+ hours a week, I barely had time to sleep, let alone watch lectures and do the labs. I was in the driver seat of the struggle bus, but I made it work but the class finds out that we have projects with a time window for completion and if that window is not met, you will start to fall behind rather quickly, cause the class must continue on its schedule, thus compounding the workload you have to complete. If you start to drown in the workload, you have to move classes which is how they made it a "your own pace," I had to move classes once but after that I found a better rhythm and powered thru the camp. When it came to labs and the projects there was no real grading system outside of the pass/fail system. the labs and lecture tests you could retake as many times as you needed to and i never received a grade for my projects, I did get feed-back from our instructor when I presented the project via zoom but that was the extent of that. They also gave us LinkedIn help and some resume assistance but i missed the resume lecture and from what i gathered from my fellow classmates- it was not helpful at all. Towards the end of the camp, my cohort was a breath away from revolt against school but we managed to finish before that, granted on the discord channel created by our class, some were still trying to get a partial refund back for being sold false goods. I myself can't say much to that cause I feel like it was still a good learning experience for me, I accomplished what, at first, I thought I would have to slam my head against to figure out what I needed to do. I established a virtual network that had some network configurations that needed to be addressed, I wrote a Python code that would scan a host for open ports and display them, I scanned the Metasploit frame work and exposed and executed some its vulnerabilities, and I wrote some firewall rules and installed an IDS/IPS (SNORT) to monitor the vulnerabilities that I discovered earlier, and setup an alert to get a custom log. To say I didn't get anything from it would be a lie, but I would have appreciated more clarity up front before I signed on the dotted line, "hey you're gonna need to set a side at least 24+ hours a week to keep up with class/labs," "It's not a true 'go at your own pace' course, if you fall behind you will have to move classes and that could change the time of day that you go and which days you go to class." It was an experience for sure, and like I said at the beginning of this, if you are looking into a boot camp of any kind make sure you DO YOUR RESEARCH! I hope this helps you on your journey into the cyber field.
