What was the most significant challenge that you faced during your doctorate at The DaVinci Institute? And how did you overcome it?
The biggest challenge I faced was identifying a research topic. At DaVinci, you do not get assigned a supervisor upfront; instead, you receive one after your proposal is accepted and approved. This was my biggest hurdle. I explored various options extensively, and it took me about a year to formalise and finalise my proposal, as far as I recall.
In a few words, how can you describe your journey to computing for quantification?
My journey was interesting because I live in Zambia and I needed to find out the most interesting thing because Zambia I was not studying that much and also I’m coming from the cyber security domain so I just kind of combined everything all together into one topic and then I need to engage this business sector of Zambia explaining the importance of that.
Discussed with the employees themselves, and this is my journey. Eventually, I started small with interviews, this was my methodology, just interviews, and then I found out how much interest and benefit there is in this research, so I expanded it even more, and I needed to expand my research to contain a lot of guidance from official agencies of the United States and Europe, and then also on top of that, and top of the interviews, I needed to add the legal framework of Zambia.
So now every business that uses that in Zambia has a whole framework for it to comply with the Zambian law and to increase their cybersecurity and cyber awareness
And this is just for me, this is the first stage. I am already talking to the government and businesses about how to implement that in the businesses, how to officially help the businesses in Zambia to implement that, and to secure the Zambian economy, which is struggling a lot.
The DaVinci Institute’s TIPS™ Framework, do you find it helpful?
I come from a background of policing. I was a police officer for a lot of years, many years. And during this policing career, I studied for my bachelor’s degree and my master’s. And then I moved to the private sector. I am doing cybersecurity for governments mostly.
I had a lot of subordinates under me, hundreds. So DaVinci TIPS™ is unique. I did a lot of it without knowing the framework itself, but of course, I adopted things from that to my journey and my career forward.
What advice would you give to someone, or an upcoming doctoral candidate, who is thinking, Should I do it?
You must have the passion to study, because otherwise it takes a lot of time. You need to sacrifice a lot of your time, family time. You need to think big and not just do it. You need to be extremely interested in that and make an impact. There are things that will make an impact on society.
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