During his senior year at Orono High School, Louis Kraimer knew he wanted to pursue a career in cybersecurity, so he researched programs online and was surprised to discover that Dunwoody offered a four-year degree. The program’s hands-on approach appealed to him, so he applied, and enrolled.
It was important to Kraimer that he be able to apply the technical concepts he learned right away rather than learning the theory in classes and then waiting to use them until he was out in the workforce.
The cybersecurity program lived up to Kraimer’s expectations, and he thrived in his coursework. He also got involved outside of class, including helping with Dunwoody Hawks esports and co-leading the Cybersecurity Club, which fields teams for cybersecurity competitions against other colleges in the region.
He said his time at Dunwoody taught him “to keep working hard, show up, and push towards the best you can be.”
That persistence and hard work have paid off.
As Kraimer got further into his studies, he landed an internship at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis in a help-desk-like role. More recently, he was promoted to a Business Systems Analyst position in the Service Management department.
He was also selected as the academic excellence award recipient from the Computer Technology department.
In addition, to his academic achievements, Kraimer helped plan and set up some of the computer labs in the department and was a tutor to other students.
“I think the best part of being an instructor is when you learn from your students, and I definitely learned a lot from Louis,” said Brian Drexler, Senior Instructor of Computer Technology.
For his part, Kraimer enjoyed the time spent with his instructors and fellow students.
In particular, he had a lot of fun developing a red/blue team tool, which he coded in the programming language Python.
“The red/blue team tool is a cybersecurity capture-the-flag,” he said. “Pretty much the red team ‘hackers’ try to attack the blue team ‘defenders/cybersecurity analysts/etc.’ Typically, these targets include companies’ infrastructure like their servers or attacking employees of these companies to get personal information (mainly leading to identity theft).”
In addition to spending time with his girlfriend and family, Kraimer likes to compose wind ensemble (concert band) music and explore the history of operating systems/technology.
As Kraimer explained, older copies of operating systems are often archived online. Kraimer is able to install those in a virtual machine and then poke around in them to see how they work and how those earlier versions are different from modern ones or each other.
For example:
“Modern macOS is UNIX-certified and still contains core components from NeXTSTEP, which was the operating system that Steve Jobs developed before he returned to Apple in the late ’90s. NeXTSTEP was then replaced with Mac OS X (macOS) in the early 2000s,” he said.
Hopefully, Kraimer will have more time for both music composition and computing history now that he’s graduated.
For now, his plan is to continue to work at the Federal Reserve. He’s also hoping to grow in his career: “My goal is to become a future CISO/Leader in Cybersecurity, and I am looking forward to what the future holds!”