Awards & Accomplishments

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Fox Star Award FY23 (CARFAX)

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Unbeknownst to me at the time, my manager had nominated me for the Fox Star Award, a prestigious award given to roughly 50 out of 1,300+ CARFAX employees each year. I was honored to receive the award during the company’s annual FY23 meeting in recognition of my contributions to modernizing and expanding the Carfax for Police systems.

AWS Solutions Architect - Associate

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Earning the AWS Solutions Architect – Associate certification marked a key milestone in my cloud engineering journey. Studying for the exam helped reinforce core concepts like high availability, cost optimization, and secure system design across services like EC2, S3, VPC, and IAM. I made heavy use of Tutorials Dojo’s practice exams to test my understanding and identify gaps. This certification deepened my confidence in architecting scalable, fault-tolerant systems on AWS—skills I use daily in my work building and maintaining cloud infrastructure.

CompTIA Security+ Certification

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Security+ was my first formal step into the world of cybersecurity and risk-driven thinking. Preparing for the exam helped solidify my foundational knowledge of security principles, network defense, and secure software development practices. A huge part of my success was thanks to Professor Messer’s free Security+ course on YouTube, which provided clear, approachable explanations that were instrumental to my success on this exam. Earning this certification not only validated my skills but also deepened my interest in building secure, reliable systems—an area I continue to focus on in my professional work.