After attending North Western Preparatory school in San Bernardino Juan was appointed to the United States Air Force Academy in 2018. But after less than a year, he decided he’d had enough of the military. He wanted a change, but wasn’t sure what, and instead of going back home to Southern California, moved to Santa Cruz in 2019 and started taking classes at Cabrillo and exploring his options. For 2 years, he took ICT courses that resulted in earning dual AS degrees in Computer Support and Systems & Network Admin along with industry certifications from Cisco, CompTIA, and VMWare. (He now has over a dozen!)
How Juan acquired his work experience demonstrates the power of BayICT partner connections. While at Cabrillo, he landed an intern job at Looker Data Sciences, which became part of Google Cloud. During his 2nd year at Cabrillo, Juan was also a member of the BayCyber team and supported the planning, design, development, and infrastructure administration for regional competitions and high school cyber camps. Juan heard about NextGen Cyber Talent’s internship program and applied to join the Spring 2021 cohort. He successfully completed the Securonix SNYPR training and combined with the Cabrillo and BayCyber experience, NextGen rated him a top (Tier 2) internship candidate. Last June, Juan was placed as a QA software engineer intern at Balbix. (Driven by AI, the Balbix platform gathers and analyzes inventory and cyber risk information.) This fall, he was hired as a full-time Balbix employee and moved from QA to development.
And Juan is not done! After he completed his general education requirements at Cabrillo, Juan transferred to Western Governors University in April 2021. The extra work at Cabrillo paid off and Juan graduated in September with a BS in Cybersecurity. He now has his eyes set on earning a MS in Data Analytics to continue pursuing his interest in the development of AI products for cybersecurity.
Juan always sees where he’s going next, a trait instilled in him early, while a 9th grader. A teacher asked him, “what do you want to do with your life?” That has to be the absolute best question a teacher, mentor, counselor, manager, or role model could ask of any young career seeker!