Dave: Grow your cybersecurity career with mentors

My name is Dave.  
 I'm a Principal Security Strategist with Google Cloud.  
 My job is to work directly with  security practitioners to help  them protect their organizations. 
 What I love about my job is the variety. 
 One day I might be troubleshooting  a technical problem for a customer. 
 The next day I might be coding up  a solution to a certain problem. 
 Every day is something new and I never get bored. 
 I was a kid growing up in the Midwest. 
 I went off to college to study engineering, I thought. 
 But I realized that I wasn't really into engineering,  but I loved computer science, 
 which I didn't even know was an option. 
 I ended up working as  a help desk person early in college,  but then I got a job as a system administrator. 
 I found myself working at  a startup in the payments industry. 
 My job switched from being in general  IT person to being a cybersecurity person. 
 I spent seven years in that job and did everything  from one man security shop to  running a medium-sized security  organization toward the end. 
 Then I switched over to the other side of the table  and started working for security vendors. 
 That gave me the opportunity to  see how literally hundreds  of other organizations run their security programs,  and that was really eye-opening. 
 Cybersecurity is interesting because you can really  bring your entire life experience to cybersecurity. 
 What you're doing is trying to protect an organization,  not necessarily like from an accident,  
 but you're protecting an organization from a human being on the other side who's  trying to do your organization harm. 
 One thing that's becoming clear  is that people from diverse backgrounds and  diverse experiences typically bring 
 a great deal of improvement to how we deal with that. 
 I highly recommend getting  involved with security organizations. 
 It's a place to meet other people who  can help you along in your career. 
 I think people are surprised to learn  just how much help is available in our industry. 
 There are lots of folks who are more senior and  more accomplished who are willing to be mentors. 
 I think the best thing that you can do as someone who's  looking for a mentor is to be assertive. 
 Have a plan, have  a few things in mind that you want to work on, 
 and then reach out to someone who maybe works in  that particular area of  cybersecurity and ask them for help. 
 I think you'll be surprised at  just how helpful folks will be. 
 (me who literally hasn't asked for help and when i do its just study, get certs apply)