Hello all, Jin here, and welcome to my latest blog. Today, I'd like to take a moment to talk about not just my experience with preparing for and taking the eJPT, but how I even got to that point to begin with. After all, it hasn't even been a year since I started learning Python, and really, that's what kicked this whole journey off. So without further ado, let's rewind back to when I got started on this path in April of 2020.

(Note: If you're just here for the eJPT talk, skip down to the "Certification or Bust" header. Might want to at least skim through though, I link all the resources I've gained anything from over my journey.)

You See, It All Started When...

April 2020. The start of the Japanese school year. School had started, yes, but there were no students. Teacher attendance was staggered between coming in and working from home. And everyone wondered what to do with the Assistant Language Teacher (that is, me) because, if there aren't any students for the ALT to interact with, what do they even do?

That was a question I was already asking myself, because as an ALT I would find myself either completely underutilized, or hand-waved into doing literally everything and forsaking that whole "assistant" portion of my title because "Oh I'm not very good at English so you do it. All of it."

But with covid shutting the schools, I really found myself seeking some sort of meaning out of my work. I may have stumbled into an answer when an English teacher at the Junior High School I visited (one of three total schools in a week) asked me if I could record some dialogues from the textbook with her to upload to the school site so students could access them at home for home study. I enthusiastically agreed--finally, a purpose! But we only did the first few. And only for her grade.

"What about the other two grades?" I asked. Those weren't her concern, I was told in a very polite, Japanese way. O...kay. But, as teachers, shouldn't we be working towards the benefit of all students?

Ask the other teachers if they want to do it. If they do, you can do it with them.

Right. Ask the teachers that I don't see because they're not scheduled to come in on the two days I'm here. Right.

That was about the point something awoke in me and has been burning in me since.

Fine I'll Do It Myself

Towards the end of April, the school closings were extended through May. That being the case, us ALTs were given the option to "work from home" by the Board of Education, but the final decision was left up to our base schools. Mine was chill and didn't require I spell out what I was doing every day (there was paperwork, we were supposed to), so I found myself at home with a lot of time on my hands. Time that I was supposed to be using to work, but... on what? I was hired to English at kids. Can't do that from my apartment.

Or can I?

I had an okay mic from uni when I tried making a little side money recording voice-overs. I had experience with Audacity thanks to that and other projects as well. I could record dialogues myself! Not just for one grade, but for all! But how would I get them to the students? I could host the files on Google Drive, I suppose. But how would they access them? Can't exactly just go around to every student handing out a list of unmarked links.

I know. I'll build a website.

Sure, I don't know how, but I'm sitting here with a lot of time on my hands and nothing to do with it. I can --learn-- to make a website, that way my kids can have some audio to go with their mountain of home-study worksheets. No one effectively learns a language by just looking at scribbles and copying them. You've got to hear it. You've got to use it. To that end, I had to make this website happen.

I started with The Odin Project and freeCodeCamp. Poured hours and days into both platforms until I had enough of an understanding to start planning out a website. On the weekends, I would recruit my then-girlfriend-now-wife to record the dialogues with me. Probably not how she wanted to spend our limited time together as she lived in a different city and is an actual Japanese (as in ethnicity) teacher, meaning her work days tend to start around 7AM and end at 7PM if she's lucky. But she recognized what I was trying to do and supported me every step of the way. We got the recordings done, I cleaned them up and uploaded them, and within a month I had a functioning, if not basic website the students could access.

The dialogues were separated by year, each on a different page. The links on the home page were colored to match the color of the text book for each year. Everything was as simple and clear as possible, so there would be as little as possible in the way of a student that wanted to access the material I had created. I thought to myself, I know I originally set out to make this for my kids, but why not share it with the whole district? It's not just my kids at home without access to the audio portions of their books after all. So I submitted it to the Board of Education. Here, I made this thing, it's free, please share the link with all the Junior High Schools so they can all access this material they otherwise would not be able to in the current situation.

Thanks, but no thanks, was their response.

After getting over their initial shock that an ALT would actually spend their "work from home" time actually working from home, they told me that they appreciated my efforts but they cannot force schools to use this. Despite, you know, it being in my contract that has to be renewed every year that one of the ALT's duties is to produce materials for use in lessons. Was I asking them to mandate using my site? No. I made a thing and asked them to share it with the other schools because I don't have that kind of easy access to every school in the city. Present it as an option that is there should they want to use it. Nobody is forced to use anything.

We can't tell them to use it. Show it to your schools, and they can use it if they want.

It was at that point it realized that, as far as the Board of Education was concerned, the point of my existence was so that they could point at me and go, "Look! We're Englishing! We're exposing our children to foreign culture~" without any actual substance behind it whatsoever.

Naturally, that didn't feel great.

The Great Transition

Don't get me wrong. I love teaching, guiding, mentoring. I have fond memories of the students that came to me with questions about living and studying abroad, of the students that befriended me over chats of grammar and idiosyncrasies in both our native languages, of being a living breathing jungle gym that "couldn't speak their language" but somehow understood everything they said for the little ones. For the students that opened up to me because I gave them space to.

But this was not a situation where I could be the best for those that depended on me. From May on, I started learning Python. My initial goal was, well, if the system I was in wasn't going to be any help, I'd go around it. I'd build software and games that made learning what I had to teach fun and enjoyable. Students could spread it among themselves instead of having to rely on adults handing them whatever they deemed to be useful. Hopes were never higher in the House of Jin. I bought a dirt cheap laptop specifically for development purposes. Picked up Python Crash Course and spent every free moment with it. Any downtime at work was spent in that book. Did all the labs, played with my own code, and foolishly thought I could find work doing backend in Python in a few short months.

18 million yen a year. About $16,500. A year. That was the going rate at the time for entry level devs in Tokyo. That drove home another truth that I wasn't quite consciously aware of yet. Labor exploitation isn't just in education, it's everywhere. People like to take advantage of adults fresh out of university or new to an industry because they typically don't have any work experience in the field. And, in Japan anyway, seniority trumps skill. You're older? You get paid more. Young? Move back in with your parents or live in a waterlogged box and work for scraps because you're "passionate". You'll get a livable wage in about 10 years, after you've proven your loyalty to the company. Maybe.

Things were getting more serious with the then-girlfriend. We might have gotten married in the summer. And I was thinking about our future. My low-paid unstable job and her low-paid, thankless-but-stable one. That was about the time a friend that had been helping to guide my developer learning suggested another course.

Why not cybersecurity? You have the passion. You have the skill. I bet if you applied yourself you'd go places.

He couldn't have been more right.

Hack All The Things!

Fall came, and I picked up Hacking: The Art of Exploitation. I studied it in my off time, just like Python Crash Course. And something just felt right about it. I felt like this is where I needed to be. Where I --should-- be. After talking it over with my new family, I quit my job in November and moved to be with them. They supported me as I spent every waking moment studying cybersecurity starting with PentesterLab and TryHackMe's Advent of Cyber 2020. AoC2020 gave me the confidence that this was in fact a path I could pursue and pursue well, a path that I was meant to walk--no, run down. Every day I studied like it was my job, because it essentially was. I studied for months through the winter, I built a network on Twitter and LinkedIn thanks to suggestions from the aforementioned friend and videos from people like Neal Bridges and David Bombal . After AoC 2020 I started #100DaysOfHacking and committed to making an effort to learn more every day. And in February I applied for my first job.

It was with a company whose CEO posted the position on Twitter (there's a point for networking!) and I expressed interest. He asked me to send over my CV so I did. But I didn't stop there. I kept learning, kept watching videos. Kept seeking out how to get my foot in that door.

A common theme I came across was that if people transitioned to cybersecurity with any sort of expediency, they had a background in something IT related. SysAdmin, Networking, Development, Help Desk... never teachers. Or truck drivers. Or other mundane jobs. It dawned on me that, even with this blog, even with all the fun little badges and certificates from PentesterLab and TryHackMe, I would need objective proof that I could do the thing. Because I didn't have an IT background in any way, shape, or form. I didn't work in an IT-related field. I don't have an IT-related degree. I literally come out of nowhere with a few months of experience on platforms (very excellent platforms, mind you!) with no official recognition from a certifying body. So again, following advice from a David Bombal video featuring Neal Bridges, once March came I decided to take the eJPT.

Certification or Bust

For the month of March (save for a harrowing week of technical interview mishaps and a surprise first CTF that probably deserves its own post), I shifted focus from TryHackMe's learning paths to INE's PTS course. For those that don't know, I take all my notes in CherryTree. I organize them into nested pages in a way that makes sense to me and follows the flow of whatever I'm studying. I applied this process to the PTS course, literally copying every slide word for word into my notes, but in a way that made sense to me, personally. If I could not rephrase what the slide was talking about in my own words, I would not move on until I could. That, more than anything probably helped me retain the vast amount of information this course covers. The only part I admittedly skimmed was the Python section because, well, if you've read this far, you know I started my IT journey with learning Python.

In addition to the notes on the course itself, I was still working on TryHackMe as secondary study. If a tool or a process or method was mentioned in the PTS course, I would look for a THM room covering the same or similar topic. So essentially, I practicing what I was learning, not just writing it down. This calls back to what I said about learning languages earlier in this post: learning isn't just reading and regurgitating scribbles, but actually applying that knowledge. It's crucial to not forget that second part.

Once I finally made it to the Black Box labs at the end of the course, I did my best to complete them without checking the solutions unless I was absolutely stuck. Every step of the way I made notes of what I was doing, what I was attempting, complete with screen captures (which are important for me because I need that visual to reinforce what I'm reading). The first lab took me 3.5 hours. The second, 7.5. The third, 3.

The biggest thing I learned doing the labs, what they really drove home, is that there is always a way. It may not always be readily apparent, it may be so simple that you accidentally overlook it, but there is always a way. I took that lesson to heart, gave it time to settle deep within the recesses of my mind, and then challenged the reset Black Boxes again from scratch. I didn't use the notes I made before (save for checking the syntax of a command in a couple instances), and I didn't look at the solutions. The second time, the first box took 1 hour, the second 1.5, and the third less than an hour, and I did them all in one sitting. I felt so assured that the lessons they had to teach me were so well embedded in my mind that I signed up for the eJPT right after I finished.

The next day, I passed the eJPT with 19/20 questions correct. There was one question I guessed on because I couldn't find the file in question. I admit I gave up because I was already frustrated by spending over 2 hours figuring out why my smbclient would not work properly (the issue was the config file on my end, not anything to do with the test, which I figured out mid-test or else I would have answered a lot less questions...), but I was confident enough in my other 19 answers that I opted to just end my suffering and chance missing one instead of refreshing the vpn after the 6-hour availability block was over. I'm still actually a little bitter that I didn't get it, but test situations mess with my anxiety something fierce. Were it a live pentest without all the trappings of a standardized test, I would have just taken a break and come back because that is for the client. I do not take chances where others are concerned.

It's Only Up From Here

I know there are people that want to know just what I did to pass this certification test, but there's no one simple answer. For me, it was a perfect storm of timing and availability of materials. PentesterLab Pro got me started. TryHackMe (namely the Complete Beginner, Web Fundamentals, and Offensive Pentesting paths) gave me just the right balance of guidance and freedom to show me where I needed to go while still building my confidence in my ability to do the thing. The PTS course built on both of those, while also filling in necessary gaps that aren't often covered on those platforms like networking (understanding and being able to apply routing is key!). I also had the privilege of being supported while I pursued this full time. I can never thank my Japanese family and one certain benefactor enough.

But this is only the beginning. There is still so much to learn, so much to do. From now, we search in earnest for that first job and keep expanding our knowledge base. Continue shining bright, and they will recognize your light.