Why I enrolled at NJIT for graduate cybersecurity study while running MaverickBytes solo, and what formal coursework adds that self-teaching could not.
Three and a half years after finishing my computer science degree at Rutgers, I enrolled at NJIT as a graduate student in cybersecurity. I did it while running MaverickBytes solo, with products live and projects in active development, which means I voluntarily added exams, deadlines, and reflection papers to a schedule that did not have obvious room for them. This post is about why that was the right call anyway.
Everything I have built over the past year points in the same direction. Voice Journal enforces privacy through the Android permission model. O.L.I.V.I.A. keeps every byte of personal context on hardware I control. The through-line of my work is privacy enforced by architecture rather than policy, and somewhere along the way I realized I was building security-shaped things on a foundation of self-taught security knowledge.
Self-teaching got me far. It is how most working developers learn most things, and I do not regret a minute of it. But there is a difference between knowing that a design is safer and being able to argue precisely why, from threat model to protocol detail to the failure modes someone smarter than me already documented decades ago. I could feel the edges of what I knew, and the projects I want to build next sit past those edges.
So I applied to NJIT's Graduate Certificate in Foundations of Cybersecurity, which carries a direct admission pathway into the M.S. in Cybersecurity and Privacy. The certificate is the proving ground, and so far the proving is going well. I have completed coursework in internet protocols and Python API development, finished a security and privacy course this summer, and I am carrying a 4.0 into the fall semester, where data mining and the next security course are waiting.
The honest answer is structure and adversaries. Structure, because a curriculum forces you through the material you would have skipped on your own, and the skipped material is always the part you needed. Left to my own reading list, I gravitate toward whatever my current project demands. A course does not care what my current project demands. It marches through the whole terrain, and repeatedly I have hit lecture topics that reframed decisions I had already made in my own codebases, sometimes confirming them, sometimes exposing assumptions I did not know I was making.
Adversaries, because security coursework is fundamentally about thinking like the attacker, and that muscle develops differently under examination pressure than it does reading blog posts at your own pace. An exam question that chains two concepts into a working attack scenario teaches you something a tutorial never will, mostly because you cannot alt-tab away from it.
There is also a quieter benefit. Studying while shipping means every abstract concept lands on concrete ground immediately. When a lecture covers a class of vulnerability, I am not filing it away for someday. I am mentally auditing my own repositories before the lecture ends. School and practice are usually framed as competing for time, but run in parallel they compound. The coursework sharpens the projects, and the projects give the coursework somewhere to live.
It is not free. Evenings that used to go to feature work now go to exam preparation. Solo development already demands discipline about where hours go, and adding a graduate course load turns that discipline from a virtue into a survival requirement. I plan semesters now the way I plan software: identify the highest-risk surface early, prepare for it deliberately, and never let anything important depend on cramming.
But I keep coming back to a simple observation. The developer who built Voice Journal knew how to make an app private. The one coming out of this program will know how to prove it, attack it, and defend the design in the language the security field actually speaks. That gap is the difference between building good tools and doing real work in privacy engineering, and closing it is worth every lost evening.
The Quest Log has a new entry. Class of 2028, here we go.
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