Personal Narrative: Certification Practicum

Going into my senior year I was determined to find classes that challenged me and at the same time rewarded me with beneficial knowledge that I could use in my future career. While searching for potential classes I stumbled across the Certification Practicum in IT and was amazed. I had never seen a class that seemly offered immediate real world benefits like this class did. Later at my internship I asked my boss what certification I should take, he told me “seemly every other day a company’s information is getting stolen, you should take anything that deals with security”. I chose to take the CompTIA Security+ certification course and I’m glad that I did. Going into the course I had no idea about what to expect. To my knowledge I had never …show more content…
All the classes prior to this one were easy and pretty general in nature. None of them really had the feeling that they would help me out in a practical way. But once I took this class, that all changed. The certification practicum has taught me to think critically about problems in real time. Doing the lab exercises has taught me to use the world around me by working in a virtual office setting and going from room to room trying to configure a DMZ or trying to get security cameras on the network. The lab exercises have also taught me to try and take risks. By learning how to do something in the lab exercises, such has working with active directory, I have learned to take risks and be able to correct them. Perhaps I did not do something correctly, I mistakenly lock out someone’s account, but I now have to knowledge to know how to correct my problem. And one of the biggest educational goals that this course has taught me is to persevere. Once in a while some lab exercises would seem to be against me. Without the ability to persevere there would be no way that I could go back to the same lab problem and try again. This course has been greatly beneficial in strengthening my educational goals. The ITI certification practicum has also been beneficial in my career goals. Last year during my job search I couldn’t much that I was qualified for and I ended up taking a simple help desk job. Even during that I could be of much use because when people came to me with their problem, I didn’t really know how to solve them. Thankfully now with this certification course I feel much more confident in my abilities to help others. This certification also helps your resume stand out from the