Studying cybersecurity, and later teaching as a lecturer in the cybersecurity programme at BINUS University, was a pivotal part of my career.

The lecturers were never focused solely on teaching. They were actively involved in hands-on hacking, developing tools, conducting research to solve practical cybersecurity problems, creating new learning materials relevant to industry needs, and building partnerships with external organisations and industry partners to bring project opportunities to students. Because of that, students gained far more from their years at the university than presentation slides and classroom sessions.

I’d say that a significant part of my knowledge and experience came from PETIR, the cybersecurity competition team nurtured by the programme, which taught me how to hack in a practical way and apply security patterns to real-world systems, competitively.

The research culture within the programme also taught me to think systematically when identifying and solving cybersecurity problems. That mindset enabled me to conduct some of my most impactful research, which I was later able to present at the Black Hat security conference in Singapore, twice.

Once you are exposed to the international cybersecurity community, you are already halfway towards discovering opportunities to work overseas. And the cybersecurity programme at BINUS made that possible for me.