An Innovative Mindset with Zion

Transcript

Oh, this is gonna be a lot of fun. We’re now heading to the Generator Labs. Here, we’re gonna meet up with Zion, a senior majoring in computer science, who’s gonna talk about what an innovative mindset is all about here at Arizona State. Zion, you’re on.

Thanks, Alex. I grew up on the west side of the big island of Hawaii on a coffee farm to a Native Hawaiian-Chinese family. So as you can imagine, computer science was a stretch for me. I decided to attend ASU in my senior year of high school because of a great counselor I had, Miss Kekaulike. She introduced me to the idea of pursuing education in more than just my classes, and ASU was the perfect fit with its startup and research culture.

So I joined ASU and started my degree in computer science. When I got here, I was hungry to join a startup or a club. I was introduced to a hacking club, the pwndevils. Don’t worry, the good kind of hacking. I had no knowledge of cybersecurity at the time and was honestly frightened by some of the complex concepts. To learn more about my major, I started competing in these 48-hour events called CTFs, cybersecurity competitions where we hack into sanctioned machines as fast as we can. I was highly devoted to these competitions and found myself competing in them every single weekend.

Soon I saw my grades taking off because I had acquired potentially years of experience in computer science in only a few months. I saw myself rising to the top of my class because of a super interesting extracurricular club I had joined. This is really where my innovative mindset started forming. As I started getting better at these competitions, I started getting invited to finals competitions with my team all over the world. These experiences really start changing the way you start thinking about problems and open up an entirely new way of approaching things.

Now, as the president of pwndevils, I try to make sure that these experiences can be replicated for the next generation of ASU hackers. Soon, I found myself asking, if I can do all these hacking things, how can I fix them so bad guys can’t? I then found myself in a research lab where I could take all these things I had learned as a competitive world-class hacker and apply them to research to fix the real world. My lab inspired me to do great things and it parallels the experiences that many other students have here at ASU in research labs.

It’s always intriguing to hear about the different things people are doing in their labs, like volcanic analysis with AI-driven drones, or modeling black holes, or exploring education through virtual reality simulations. All very interesting topics. I was able to access this hidden and complex field all through the experiences that ASU had made available to me, which completely opened my eyes to a whole new world of possibilities. Alex, back to you.

Zion, that was awesome. Great job. These hackathons you’re getting to compete in through ASU look amazing. I wanna come to one of these events one day. Thank you again for sharing your story. Cheers, Zion.