WGU — B.S. Cybersecurity
学士課程
Lines served: Education Line · Sep 2026
Western Governors University: B.S. Cybersecurity & Information Assurance, graduated September 2026. Competency-based, so each course is a proctored assessment or a defended project rather than seat time.
A degree taken while doing the job
B.S. Cybersecurity and Information Assurance at Western Governors University, completed September 2026. I took it while working as CTO for two companies, which is the only reason it is worth writing about: the coursework and the day job kept landing on the same problems from opposite directions.
Why competency-based mattered here
WGU does not award credit for seat time. Each course ends in a proctored assessment or a project that gets defended against a rubric, and you move when you can demonstrate the competency, not when the term ends.
For someone already doing the work that cuts both ways, honestly. Material I used daily — networking, Windows and Linux administration, incident response — I could move through quickly, because I could already demonstrate it. Material I had not touched went slowly and there was nowhere to hide, because there is no attendance mark to offset a failed assessment.
The parts that were genuinely new to me were the formal ones: writing a risk assessment to a standard rather than to taste, and the governance and compliance material that I had only met previously through the narrow lens of a PCI DSS audit.
Where the degree and the job met
- Secure software. I write and own the applications this business runs on, so the secure-development material was immediately testable against my own code rather than a toy example.
- Digital forensics. I had been doing endpoint investigations already, from acquisition through a root-cause write-up. The coursework gave me the order of operations and the chain-of-custody discipline I had been approximating.
- Governance. The weakest area coming in, and the one that most changed how I document decisions.
Honest scope
The degree is bundled with several industry certifications, which is part of why the Education line has the run of CompTIA stations it does. It is an undergraduate degree earned largely remotely and asynchronously, not a research programme, and I would not present it as one.
The M.S. on the same model is now underway, expected April 2027: that is the branch off this terminus.
Stack: Security operations · Network security · Digital forensics · Secure software · Governance & compliance