CIS 115 Personal Biography

My name is Josh Riess and I’m from Overland Park, Kansas. I’m currently a freshman at Kansas State University majoring in Computer Science. I chose to come to Kansas State because of the spectacular college of engineering as well as the location, close enough to drive back in a day, but not too close where my parents would be inclined to pop in on me. I am interested in computer science because of the security aspect of it, as well as the fact that I have always been fascinated with computers and how they work and what I can do with them. My hobbies include working on my home network and servers, Scouting, camping, and hiking. My favorite thing is to mess around with my home network and try to set up servers with different services that all work together. I have an older sister and a younger brother and a loving mother and father. I worked at CommunityAmerica Credit Union for the past 2 summers as well as after school for my senior year. I worked as a paid intern in the Solution Center, their help desk that also did so much more than a normal help desk. I spent my first months doing things such as moving computers around for employees moving locations, placing PCs for new employees, and pulling hardware for employees that left the credit union. We also had another company in our building named TruHome Solutions. TruHome contracted the Information Services department of CommunityAmerica to do their support and manage their infrastructure needs. In the final few months of my internship, I ended up taking phone calls from the solution center phone queue as well as taking tickets from the email ticket system. I would spend my entire 5 hours at work taking calls from employees and trying to fix them. I had at my disposal a program that allowed me to remotely connect to someone’s computer and take control of it, I even had the ability to lock their keyboard and mouse if need be. On other days, I would spend 5 hours in the back up position, watching the email ticket queue and taking calls if the on call person was swamped and needed my help. This internship gave me lots of good experience and also a fall back plan for if I can’t find a job later on in life, because I’m sure they’ll be happy to have me back and not have to train someone new from the ground up. After I graduate, I plan on finding a job related to Cyber Security. The actual job I will look for depends on if I decide to try to get the SFS scholarship for students planning on going into the cyber security field (link Here). If I succeed in getting the scholarship, I would be required to work in the government for 2-3 years, depending on how long I am on the scholarship. The textbook chapters that I am most looking forward to getting in to are chapters 6 and 8. Chapter 6 in “Memory: Information and Secret Codes” and chapter 8 is “Computers That Learn and Adapt”. For my news related to technology and computers, I usually go to Google News and look at the “Technology” tab. I also have tabs added for Hacking, Cyber Security, and Servers. For my information specifically about Cyber Security, I rely on an email that I get every day called “The Cyberwire”. I signed up for their emailing list a few months ago, and I receive information on the world of hacking/cyber security every day. In addition to just the facts, The Cyberwire also adds some explanation for the information.