Hi, I am Lee Wongi, a junior at POSTECH. My original dream was to become a chemist. I enjoyed chemistry because I was fascinated with the fact that I could construct novel materials utilizing various materials as building blocks. So, I naturally spent a lot of time around chemistry until middle school.
My first real experience with computers was in high school. Before, the only times I had interacted with a computer was when I hung out with my friends after exams and played a game or two. Since I also used a 2G phone at the time, Tetris and Sudoku on my phone were the extent of my exposure to digital technologies. When I took an information science class in high school, I was taught C and C++ for the first time. This class gave me the revelation that computers could also be a medium to synthesize something with my own hands, like chemistry had been.
However, my normal academic responsibilities were hard on their own, and learning new programming languages like C or C++ was too strenuous for my schedule. Learning fragments of languages or algorithms on rare occasions was the best I could do. Thinking back, maybe it was because they were not very interesting topics. Time passed by, and when I became a senior, I truly thought about what interested me. I had written about my desired job as a computer specialist since I was told it was important to write the same job consistently, but I had to think about what I genuinely wanted. Of all things, hacking seemed interesting and impressive, so I chose it as my dream career. In retrospect, I had been unaware that the awe-inspiring and cool results were the fruits of great amounts of effort and study.
After I had decided on my dream career, I had a vague direction of what I needed to study to achieve my dreams. I looked up on various activities or clubs in universities that covered such materials and tried to read textbooks on my own. However, I felt a huge limit to what I could achieve with pure autodidacticism. Books contained information I simply could not understand, and environments to implement and try out such ideas were lacking. So, when I was eventually admitted to POSTECH, I thought that joining a school club and studying more would help.
Joining a club opened up a new horizon of opportunities and I learnt so much more than before. I learnt how to build environments for hacking, contemporary exploit techniques, and more. The most important part of the learning process was of course self-study but having people and a system to guide me was great. Studying brand-new subjects and solving problems were very hard in the moment but solving them gave me great pride and excitement. I think this excitement is what keeps me going and pushes me to participate in various Capture-the-Flag (CTF) hacking competitions.
While I started hacking for the simple reason that it was ‘cool’, now it has taken on a different meaning for me. Simple interest and fun aside, the fact that I can solve various problems in competitions gives me the validation that I have progressed a lot. I will probably keep studying in the field of cybersecurity. Of course, while I still have a lot to learn and must do much to keep up, solving these problems motivates and excites me. Furthermore, I will keep on going until I am sufficiently skilled enough to not only solve problems in competitions, but also analyze real-world applications and websites to find security vulnerabilities.

Lee Wongi (CSE 20)