Kai Marshall

Vocational Essay

What is my vocation? In order to understand that, first, I need to understand what

a vocation is and what it means to me. A vocation is something more than a career

path, It’s what drives a person to contribute back to society. It is created from the role

you play along with the actions you take, which can cover a job, family, or even just

being a contributing member of the community to taking time to care for yourself. When

I was young around the age of nine or ten I would often get on my dad’s laptop and play

web games whenever I could since I didn’t own a console at the time. One day I click on

the wrong website and it ended up affecting my dad’s whole laptop deleting files and

folders. I didn’t understand what was going on I just wanted the computer to stop

bugging out so I tried to restart it but it ended up making things worse luckily there was

a best buy down the street and they were able to point out exactly what was wrong and

also wiped the virus clean from the laptops hard disk. I never understood how they

came to fix the issue. Still, when I came to Seton Hill I wanted to be tech-savvy so bad I

threw myself into the technology field because I wanted to learn more about computer

structures and how new technologies were made and how they worked. Spending time

learning about the different ways different systems worked I grew an interest in

protecting systems from harm like viruses and hackers. I believe my vocation would be

towards cybersecurity and working for a business to protect its systems and servers

from hackers wanting to exploit not only the business information but its customers as

well.
 While reading the article about Laborem Exercens written by Pope John Paul II I

learned that he wanted to create basically labor policies to ensure justice for all workers.

The Exercens argued that the dignity of labor is such that laborers are indebted to co-

own the goods that they make and also share the decision regarding the use of these

goods, while also being entitled to share a decision on the matter of the work process.

“man must earn his daily bread and contribute to the continual advance of science and

technology and, above all, to elevating unceasingly the cultural and moral level of the

society within which he lives in community with those who belong to the same family.”

What I took from this quote is that all of us have a responsibility to contribute to the

workforce in order to advance society in different fields like science, technology, or even

human health. I think with my vocation being cybersecurity, I can protect people's

systems and servers from harm or theft. With the rise of technology increasing so fast,

especially in the past ten years, Hackers are coming up with new ways to steal and

harm others from a distance simply by clicking view buttons on a screen, whether it be

their bank accounts, their emails, or even important files or data on your computer or

device. I think this path of work will give me great dignity because not only am I stopping

someone whose intent was to do harm to someone they maybe never even met but

also taking pride in protecting someone that didn’t even know they were being attacked.

During the excerpt from John Lewis, I learned what it means to stand up for what

you believe in whether that's rights, justice, or how you feel about the world. He led

multiple civil rights movements and lead a bunch of protests to inspire change in the

American people. “I had this sense that, if I believed, if I had faith in my own capacity
and ability to get things done, I too could change things. So I just never gave up and

never gave in. I just tried to hold on.” Some people think cybersecurity has nothing to

do with social justice but it's the exact opposite. A lot of professions protect social rights

physically and in person but cybersecurity does it behind a screen and since the internet

and the web are one of the most powerful tools we use every day what better way to

protect companies, small businesses, or even the employees from cyberattacks and

data breaches to their network from unauthorized user’s and or attackers. Whether you

like it or not our cellular devices can either help us or harm us and it's up to people like

me to make sure that people don’t get hurt unknowingly by masked attackers behind a

screen. Just like John Lewis protested for a better world and for the freedom of others, I

see it as im doing the same thing just behind a screen.

My thoughts about the Amazon case are that I think it's pretty interesting how

these two opposing sides that are supposed to work with each other in order to create

success in the company are failing to realize that in order to build a successful

company, sacrifices must be made. I’m not talking about the workers but I'm talking

about Amazon as a whole. “The legal delay likely to come next will give this

generation’s labor movement observers a bird’s-eye view of one reason why unions

represent only 6% of the private sector workforce.” Over the summer I worked at FedEx

as a package handler, carrying packages to their right routes so that they may be

delivered but one thing I did find interesting is that most of my co-workers came from

Amazon, commenting on how awful the workforce is over there and how bad the

management is. I think Amazon needs to sacrifice more than just paying for dental or
healthcare. They need to see that the work they put out on their workers is labor and

that they need to sacrifice money, time, and effort to make sure that the workers get

everything they need otherwise people start to leave and look for better opportunities.

To summarize, I’ve always had an interest in technology. I’ve always wondered

how they make something so small (like a cellular device) be able to do so much. For

example telling time, checking emails, communicating with people, or even just

checking the weather I wanted to know it all. It gave me my passion to pursue a

technology degree, whether learning how certain systems work or how to protect them

from harm. I didn’t really get into technology until I hit college since high school I didn’t

really have a “choice” on what I wanted to pursue. Once I got to Seton Hill I learned so

much about different categories of technology for example Operating Systems, Data

Analytics, The Analysis of Systems, and even Machine learning. Through all these

courses I taught how systems worked, how to protect them, and what things could be

placed within the system in order to make it fail. Once I was taught these things I felt as

if it was my responsibility to use my skills and knowledge in order to help others that

might not know as much as I do about the technology field, and since the field is getting

larger each year I think it is that much more important to use my skills to protect others..