In today’s business climate, having a certain amount of experience can certainly be more important than just having a degree or certification. For the full-time student, acquiring said experience can be difficult to say the least. CCDC competitions provide an environment in which the people involved get ‘real-life’ experience in how these systems work in situations that mimic ordinary business activity. It is aid that a CCDC team gets 6 months to a year’s experience in 8 hours.

I hope to bring to light some of my personal past experiences, talk about team dynamics, typical practice scenarios, and the rigor of a competition. I will then discuss how some of those experiences help provide me with valuable information, with regard to performing my actual duties as a systems administrator responsible for a large number of systems

In addition, I hope to encourage others in the industry to do whatever they can to help support and organize more CCDC teams at schools around the country. Programs such as CCDC and the high school level competition Cyber-Patriot are going to help create the next generations of information security professionals.

My talk will have some very serious talk about lessons learned, and some humor about the agony of learning those lessons.
 

Recorded at AIDE 2013