“Fezzik, You Did Something Right.”
After the undeniable failure to complete my grad school program case study, I was understandably beat down. I was sure that I just wasn’t going to be able to do it and I was never going to graduate. But, clearly I had to try again. I switched back to my original focus area, Information Security and Assurance. For this case study I could write a research paper, which was much more in my wheelhouse than building a whole website (yeesh). But first, I had to come up with an idea and write a proposal. I was riding the struggle bus right out of the garage. Coming up with an idea was harder than I thought it would be. I narrowed it down to satellites and drones. Satellites because I’ve always been a space nerd and drones because – I honestly don’t know where drones came from. So that’s what I ended up settling on! I would write a giant research paper on consumer drones.
The program provided a template for the project proposal but that didn’t decrease the difficulty very much. The struggle bus was going full speed. I was texting back and forth with people trying to gain reassurance that what I was writing wasn’t completely off base. I had no idea what the program director’s expectations were and my advisor was not helpful in enlightening that for me (Later I asked him for a ballpark idea of final page or word count and he just sent back “Let the research guide you.” This response infuriated me at the time, but now I’m embroidering it on a pillow.). I muddled through the proposal, or at least what I felt was muddling. I turned it in, not feeling confident or like it was my best work, but they accepted it. So now I was stuck with drones.
What even is a drone? I honestly didn’t know. I had never even been casually interested in drones much less concerned with their cybersecurity. I had to create a timeline for the proposal, so I started there. The first phase was finding research articles and find them I did. I won’t bore you with the intimate details of scouring tech journals. Suffice it to say, it’s exactly how you think it is. I accumulated about 45 articles and then started writing. Immediately I felt overwhelmed. The struggle bus was already swerving. These articles were so incredibly technical and the topics so esoteric I could have spent a whole semester just trying to understand each one of them. Wringing my brain for every last bit of possible background knowledge that I had learned over the past 2 years; I applied it to the security of drones. I hashed out swathes of words on Blockchain, RF fingerprinting and physically unclonable functions. I was trying to stick super tightly to the concept of security. Exhausted, I sent a first draft to my advisor who just told me that I needed “much more content.” Ok, great, thanks.
I was behind. I couldn’t let this project eat me alive too. I had to redirect the struggle bus onto a less treacherous road. I didn’t know anything about drones. I had never even seen a drone in person. How was I writing about conceptual Blockchain based drone network security without even knowing the basics of how a drone worked? But I didn’t have time to do all kinds of background reading that wouldn’t end up in the paper, or did I? I hesitated, and then made a section heading called “Background.” I added a sub-section called “History.” If it was part of this project for me to learn about drones from the ground up, then it was going to be part of the project! I wasn’t supposed to be focusing on military drones, but every drone out there has its roots in the military. And so that’s what I said as I confidently penned (typed) a summarization of the history of drones, the basics of drone mechanics and the human-drone relationship. This would prove to be a turning point for me and the struggle bus.
Researching all of this seemingly useless and off-topic information had done its job! I began to think about the whole thing differently. After that I went into a crazy frenzy, which is how I would remain for the duration of the semester. I lived and breathed drone security. I couldn’t have a normal conversation (still can’t). My husband doesn’t care about physically unclonable functions, but he sure heard about them. When we had a plumbing emergency, I took the dogs into the bedroom and worked for 4 hours while the pups tried to demand my attention because they were bored, and a plumber LOUDLY attempted to fix our drain problem. It was one of my more productive work sessions.
I think I shocked my advisor when the next draft I sent him was over 50 pages. Among other, sometimes useful, critiques and edits he told me to “add in a bit to capture what you’ve learned beyond the program.” That was the best idea he gave me. I ended the paper with an imaginary proposal for a full drone network security program and then talked about how I couldn’t have gotten there without researching all of the non-technical information that I was afraid to add because it was off-topic. It sounds better than that in the paper, but I’ll let you read it for yourself. My project is available to download on the homepage.
The last thing my advisor told me was “Good job on your project.” That was the most feedback I’d gotten from him all semester; it was marginally validating. I have never waited so impatiently or anxiously for a grade in my life. I was hoping for a B, but I would have been ok with a C because it would mean I could still graduate. That was where my mind had settled. When finally the grade appeared on the portal I didn’t understand what I was looking at. What was this “A?” Had I really done that? It’s hard to accept a success when you’ve failed so hard and then struggled mightily to get there, but at that point it was the only thing left to do!
