Reflections on the Pandemic: Passing Time
I graduated from the University of Oregon’s cybersecurity certificate program last weekend. The program was an intensive six-month boot camp covering the breadth of the cybersecurity field, from network administration to digital forensics. I am anxious now to add some depth to that breadth — the curriculum felt more intent on drowning students than imparting knowledge. But now that my head spins less from course assignments, virtual classes and project work, I am shocked to return to pandemic life.
It’s not as if the pandemic stopped or faded from view during my months in the boot camp, but my experience of it changed. At the most basic level, time assumed new form and structure, elements that vanished as lock-downs wore long. But today, even with my part-time job and full-time study schedule to prepare for industry exams, time is reverting to a gelatinous state, and progress is hard to measure.
I struggled with the course. I don’t love computers, I’m not a gamer, and outside of work, I spend as little time as possible in front of a screen. When it comes to TV, I watch nothing but NFL games and such national events as the State of the Union address. I don’t have a streaming account of any kind, and although I love my iPad, I do most of my reading on paper — thumbing through books or the glossy sheets of The New Yorker. My iPhone is the only screen I miss when I’m not near it, but give me three days in the mountains, and I forget why I need it.
So maybe my disinterest in digital gadgets and services is what drew me to cybersecurity because, suddenly, our entire lives went online — brunch dates spent hunched over a tablet, happy hours in the home office, concerts streamed on Facebook, everything. As a home body, I love the new routine. I don’t wear shoes very often, and I never have to worry about unwanted advances from drunk dudes. But do we really understand what we’re doing, trusting so much of our lives to the digital sphere? No, we don’t. And I wanted to spend time figuring it out.
In all honesty though, I had more concrete reasons to enroll in the course: I felt like my career path had reached a dead end, and in the long silences of pandemic life, I grew more worried about our national infrastructure — the power grid, health care system and the entirety of our economy. I recall conversations from seven years ago, when I worked for a U.S. Senator, about information security concerns that remain unaddressed even now. And in the periphery of my brain, I heard, If not you, who?
The certificate — once it arrives in the mail — will mean a lot to me. I learned. I suffered. I nearly quit twice, but my classmates cheered me on and I ended up with an A+ average somehow. But maybe more than learning and suffering, the certificate will stand as a physical representation of time passing, a monument to how the months threatened to slip by one after the other, faceless, but were instead molded into a new skill set.
There is a certain magic in working toward an end-goal. To anyone stuck in the doldrums of the pandemic’s time warp, I can offer this advice: Find something to be curious about and sign up for a live (virtual) course. The time will pass anyway, no matter how contorted. You can come away with a new credential — and even some new friends — if you are willing to struggle a bit. And isn’t that what normalcy is, a return to the struggle?
