Mentoring Students in 2025, A Year In Review!

General Context.

I've been teaching and mentoring students over the past two years (going on three years pretty soon) in a cyber security bootcamp setting. I would say the cyber security bootcamp structure is very broad which is great, but very limited given the short amount of time for each subject. It's very much like drinking from a fire hose, you can do it with some hazards.

Students often struggle to wrap their heads around certain concepts like computer networking (OSI model in particular) or the CIS Benchmarks. Information Technology and by extension Cyber Security is a very hard trade to learn for those who are just looking for a pay check in a similar manner to folks trying to learn how to do HAVAC work. I'll talk more about this later on in this post :)

What I've Noticed.

There's a distinct difference between students who want it bad enough and those willing to make excuses for why they can't complete the course. The coursework is a guideline for the rules and practices of the trade which means it may not prepare students for the all encompassing reality of the work involved. Bootcamps are designed to be a starting point for your journey kind of like a tutorial in a game. It needs to be treated like a reference guide for folks to get a sample of the basics.

The students who are successful in the bootcamp system are the ones with the grit and determination to see it through to the end no different from the average college student. The students who do the best in this system are the ones who build homelabs or try to exercise their brains by doing lot's of Q&A with their mentor. It's also important to note that I can tell who is innately curious and who isn't by the quality of the assigned projects.

Final Thoughts.

This has been a good year for my students as plenty of them have graduated the bootcamp program! I measure student success by how much progress they make on a monthly basis and the types of questions they ask me. The best qualitative metric I can point to for mentorship Zoom calls would be the length of conversation. If I feel like I've learned something about my trade or the person I'm talking to, I've done my job effectively.