Career Notes

Rashmi Bharathan: Connecting is important. [Auditor]

Rashmi Bharathan, an Information Technology Internal Auditor from Wintrust Financial Corporation sits down to share her story as a woman with 10 years in the IT industry and how she got her start. From childhood Rashmi always wanted to be a good leader, helping those around her, now she shares how helping people is a passion of hers and spends a lot of her time volunteering to help those coming into this industry. She says "It's all about, you should know your connections. That is more important. So I would say that networking and volunteering is really going to help you to grow in your career," sharing that community is the key to her success and working hard to network has been a great help to her to get her where she is today. We thank Rashmi for sharing her story with us.

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Oren Koren: Crossing music and cybersecurity. [CPO]

Oren Koren, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer from Veriti sits down to share his amazing story. Before entering the vendor side of the cyber world, Oren served for 14 years in the Israeli 8200 unit where he led a variety of cybersecurity activities and researches that eventually earned him four 8200-unit cyber innovation awards. When he left the Israel Defense Forces, he joined Check Point Software to lead their AI-based innovations and advanced data analytics projects that redefined threat hunting and SIEM applications. This eventually inspired him to start his own company, with fellow co-founder Adi Ikan. Oren shares that he had a love for music growing up, and wanted to be a musician, saying music was the catalyst to him becoming interested in the cyber field, saying "I believe the music helped me a bit with my career in cybersecurity." We thank Oren for sharing his story with us.

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Bernard Brantley: Tomorrow is a new day. [CISO]

Bernard Brantley, CISO from Corelight sits down to share his inspiring career path with others. Bernard started at the very bottom of the tech stack, and shares how he was extremely unclear about what it was that he wanted to do in life and how he was going to get there. Ultimately he reached a point now where he has the self confidence and an incredible level of success that allows him to be authentic and proudly share his story. Bernard overcame dropping out of the military academy and was trying to figure out how he could take these big dreams and aspirations he had as a child and turn them into something fruitful as an adult. Working his way up from the bottom he is now sharing how he overcomes those days of adversity, saying "I spend minimum time trying to like spin my wheels or, kind of stay in frustration or a down period and, and really, uh, try as quickly as possible to move from, "hey, this was a tough day" to, to, into, "all right, uh, this was a tough day because maybe I didn't commit enough time in this area, or maybe I could have had a bit better conversation with this person." We thank Bernard for sharing his story with us.

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Chris Hare: Find just three people. [Development]

This week, we invite our very own Chris Hare, N2K's Project Management Specialist Content Developer, to join and discuss her career. Growing up, Chris shares that she wanted to be a veterinarian, which slowly turned into her becoming a writer for the first part of her career. She shares that she started off writing marketing copy for the technology and E-commerce space, writing for everyone from NASA to adopting the written voice of the comedian, Wayne Brady. She shares that she was able to come up into her career after finding three people that were willing to help her when she needed it. She says "I became what I like to think of as a Pied Piper of seeking out three types of people. First, someone who needed help. Second, a person who served as a mechanism for my self improvement through my jealousy of them. And third, a person who gave me the nudge to continuously improve." We thank Chris for sharing her story with us.

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Ian Blumenfeld: Swimming in a pool of cyber. [Research]

Ian Blumenfeld, a Research Director from Two Six Technologies sits down to share his story with us. Ian begins his story by sharing he wanted to be a scientist, slowly he began to figure out and pinpoint more of what he liked about science, which ended up being math. Ian explains how math began to become a passion for him, and he eventually tried to pursue a career in it by teaching. He discovered teaching was not the thing for him and then started to move into the direction he wanted too, taking on more and more challenging roles until he landed where he is today. Ian says "If you're a smart person and you have skills in coding, you can swim. So it's okay to jump. It's okay to jump into the lake, you can swim. Something will get you out. You will have, you will be able to find a job. So, if you see something that looks cool, if you see something that advances you to the next stage of your career, if you have to take a little bit of a risk, it's okay." Ian wants to be someone who helped make the world a little better when it comes to code and wants to shares his desires and passions with the community. We thank Ian for sharing his story with us.

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