Originally Posted by Dave's Sheep
Well, I'll do my best to answer all your questions. In high school I was a programmer, very attributed one, I won multiple awards from my school and the Xerox Award which came with a grant, and I was split between Computer Science major and Infosec because during high school I went to a secondary college that allowed me to study cyber security in partition with my high school and still get all the credits I need. You need to do what you want because if this is your first time haering about cyber security and you lack really any knowledge about a computer then you're most likely going to be very behind everyone else taking the class and that will turn into self-doubt and you'll eventually just fall behind. If you've been studying computers for a few years now and are just kinda familiarizing with this subject then that's fine, but make sure you don't do it because it has hacking because that's part of it, but Infosec is a huge field.
Infosec is a huge field with a variety of jobs, but not in comparison to what Software Engineering or Computer Science provides. Infosec scope is very small however there's not a lot of us out there and security will be a very demanding job within the next few years if you've followed the Sony hack and what not. On the topic of colleges, just go in state. If you are superb in school, and I'm talking 36 on the ACT with AP classes 4.0+GPA then don't plan on going to Carnegie or MIT. There are many colleges in state that have the Infosec major and they're probably very good so don't get caught up about college prestige and notority because it doesn't matter when you're getting hired. They look at your certifications, high school attributions, and what you can do. Your major is an aspect of what you can do, but you'd be amazed at how many programmers get hired and they don't even know how to program, or during the programming interview they can't do a simple algorithm.
Infosec does require a bit of programming, I had a lot of programming experience before my decision, but I also learned some at the secondary college I was talking about. The secondary college had an airgap network and we were able to pentest on different OSs, we had wifi sniffers, we did all sorts of things like that so it was a great introduction to the field. I also got a book called CEH - Certified Ethical Hacker, and you can get a CEH certification once you''re 18 which I have yet to get despite the fact I read the book and have all the knowledge needed, one of the requirements for the certification is 2 years experience or attending one of their official meetings or something. Anyways, as far as programming languages go, I would learn Python. Easy to learn, simple, but very powerful and is used with Metasploit attacks and will be very helpful for when you are securing networks or websites as you can make a simple check to attempt to bypass security you've implemented without you doing it yourself a hundred times. After Python, learning something a lower level language can really help you, but not much programming is needed, but it does help.
edit: sorry for this very poor put together text. I was looking at my last sentence and how horrid it is. I just woke up. If you have any questions feel free to PM/VM me. Specific or personal is fine.
Infosec is a huge field with a variety of jobs, but not in comparison to what Software Engineering or Computer Science provides. Infosec scope is very small however there's not a lot of us out there and security will be a very demanding job within the next few years if you've followed the Sony hack and what not. On the topic of colleges, just go in state. If you are superb in school, and I'm talking 36 on the ACT with AP classes 4.0+GPA then don't plan on going to Carnegie or MIT. There are many colleges in state that have the Infosec major and they're probably very good so don't get caught up about college prestige and notority because it doesn't matter when you're getting hired. They look at your certifications, high school attributions, and what you can do. Your major is an aspect of what you can do, but you'd be amazed at how many programmers get hired and they don't even know how to program, or during the programming interview they can't do a simple algorithm.
Infosec does require a bit of programming, I had a lot of programming experience before my decision, but I also learned some at the secondary college I was talking about. The secondary college had an airgap network and we were able to pentest on different OSs, we had wifi sniffers, we did all sorts of things like that so it was a great introduction to the field. I also got a book called CEH - Certified Ethical Hacker, and you can get a CEH certification once you''re 18 which I have yet to get despite the fact I read the book and have all the knowledge needed, one of the requirements for the certification is 2 years experience or attending one of their official meetings or something. Anyways, as far as programming languages go, I would learn Python. Easy to learn, simple, but very powerful and is used with Metasploit attacks and will be very helpful for when you are securing networks or websites as you can make a simple check to attempt to bypass security you've implemented without you doing it yourself a hundred times. After Python, learning something a lower level language can really help you, but not much programming is needed, but it does help.
edit: sorry for this very poor put together text. I was looking at my last sentence and how horrid it is. I just woke up. If you have any questions feel free to PM/VM me. Specific or personal is fine.