Why Porter
“I did two years at the Wesconsin Technical College campus in Lake City while working nights on a help desk. I wasn't a great high school student, and the tech college was where I figured out I liked breaking things on purpose. When I started looking at bachelor's programs, Porter was 40 minutes west, had an articulation agreement with my exact associate degree, and ran an actual red team. That was the whole list.”
Desmond transferred 64 credits into Cybersecurity in fall 2025 under one of Porter's 2+2 transfer pathways. “I ran my courses through the transfer credit preview tool before I applied. It told me what would count. Then it all counted. I keep waiting for the catch.”
The hands-on part
Most of his week now happens in the Jarvis Technology Center, home of the cyber range: an isolated network where students attack and defend systems built to imitate a small manufacturer, a school district and, this semester, a 90-bed hospital.
- CSEC 320, Ethical Hacking & Penetration Testing: “You write a scope document before you touch anything. The scope document is the class.”
- The Cybersecurity Clinic: supervised students run free security reviews for local nonprofits and small businesses. Desmond's team spent September on a Depot District dental office's Wi-Fi. “Their guest network password was the name of the dentist's dog. It was on a sign.”
- Tuesday nights: defense drills with the Cybersecurity Club, which also hosts the spring capture-the-flag competition.
His required co-op last summer was twelve weeks as a security operations intern at Sentinel Cybersecurity Partners, triaging alerts on the overnight shift. “Turns out I was already trained for overnights. That was the one thing the help desk gave me for free.”
A hard semester
“My first semester here, I was the oldest guy in most of my classes and the only one who hadn't lived in a residence hall. Everybody already had their study groups from freshman year. I did fine on the technical work and still felt like I'd snuck in.
“The fix was small. I went to a transfer student meetup in Founders Union mostly for the free pizza and met two other people from tech colleges, one in IT and one in packaging. We still eat lunch together on Wednesdays. It's a weird table. It works.”
He also had to relearn how to write. “At the tech college the deliverable was a working config. Here it's a working config and a four-page report explaining it to someone who isn't technical. I've been to the Writing Center more times than the gym.”
A typical Tuesday
Desmond's week is built around the cyber range schedule, which is booked in four-hour blocks. “People think security is hoodies and green text. Mostly it's documentation and waiting for a scan to finish.”
| Time | Where | What |
|---|---|---|
| 8:00 a.m. | Jarvis 210 | CSEC 350, Digital Forensics: imaging a seized (fake) laptop without changing a single byte |
| 11:00 a.m. | Cybersecurity Clinic | Writing up findings for a client, in plain English, with a one-page summary for the owner |
| 1:00 p.m. | Founders Union | Lunch at the transfer table; the packaging student explains corrugated board again |
| 3:00 p.m. | Home | Four hours of paid remote work for Sentinel, which kept him on part-time after the co-op |
| 7:00 p.m. | Cyber range | Club defense drill: a simulated ransomware attack on the “hospital” network |
He commutes from an apartment near the Lake City coach stop on Mondays and Wednesdays and stays with his brother in Porter Falls the rest of the week. “The coach has Wi-Fi. I've finished two lab reports between the river bridge and the county line.”
What’s next
Desmond graduates in May 2027 and sits for his first industry certification exam in December. Sentinel has asked him back for a full-time analyst role, and he has said yes, provisionally, pending one more look at the incident-response teams in Lake City.
“If you're at a two-year school thinking a bachelor's isn't for you: it might not be. But ask the four-year school what transfers before you decide. Make them show you in writing. Mine did.”
Fictional information
UW–Porter Falls is a work of parody. Desmond Varga is an invented student: there is no such person, and every quotation, class, grade, job, hometown and anecdote in this profile is fictional. The cyber range scenario, the dental office and its dog are made up, and Sentinel Cybersecurity Partners is an invented employer.