A perfect 7 wins a Postgraduate University Medal.

IT Masters student Lauren Veenstra wins a Charles Sturt Postgraduate University Medal in graduating recently with a Master of Cybersecurity and a perfect grade point average of 7! This means that Lauren excelled by scoring better than 9 High Distinctions and 3 Distinctions in the journey to her masters.

We caught up with Lauren to ask a few questions. You can watch Lauren’s interview highlights below, or follow our article. You can also read more about Lauren’s journey in the Charles Sturt official news.

That GPA is impressive – what do you think helped you most?

It had been a long time between academic drinks, so to speak, for me, and coming back into study after several decades, I was quite hesitant and needed to brush up. CSU affords our IT Masters students access to Study Skills through CSU library, where students can quickly brush up on their academic referencing and their essay writing skills so that you can hit the ground running and dust off any academic skills you may have had from a long time ago.

We’re all holding down jobs, have a family, and limited free time; and being able to set a study plan then stick to it more or less I found quite beneficial in carving out that much needed time to attend to the readings and the assessment tasks.

But one of the most important aspects, and it might come as a surprise when we’re looking at online learning, is engaging in the social elements of the learning journey. That’s the formal peer to peer forums, being able to interact with our peers take on board some learnings, have some rigorous discussions, and know that people are experiencing the same challenges that you are. I think [this] is a really valuable contributor to our learning journeys.

Did you by any chance happen to do any of the short courses? Were they any help at all?

The short courses allow you to become familiar with some of the presenters that are delivering the course content, both in the short course area, and in the IT Masters /CSU degree pathways, and also some of the assessment items gave me good confidence that CSU and IT Masters fitted my needs.

How did you find out about IT Masters and Charles Sturt courses? What made you want to study here?

I was looking for a course syllabus that had a mix of academic and industry based learnings. There’s very few of us who are working in cyber security that are operating in a tertiary or an academic environment, so having that industry component to the subjects was of great value.

What were the best things about the course for you?

Having some respected senior industry leaders and CISOs delivering course content who were passionate about sharing their knowledge was a wonderful experience.

IT Masters, brings a really supportive team to the mix as well, who I felt want us to succeed as students. And with every university journey there’s an unavoidable degree of administrative tasks we all need to take care of, and the IT Masters team were wonderful in being able to support us with some of those [tasks] and clear the decks for us to get on with the learning.

Would you recommend our courses to somebody else?

Much like my clothes shopping journey, there is no one size fits all solution. I would strongly recommend postgraduate studies to anyone irrespective of your chosen profession, [or] your subject domain. Postgraduate studies provide a great opportunity for us to improve our subject matter expertise. It adds for career progression and a well-earned bump in remuneration along the way.

The flexibility that’s afforded through IT Masters and Charles Sturt Uni I found to be a really strong differentiator. That broad range of subject selections that we can build together for a choose your own adventure that speaks to career aspirations and the types of learnings that a student may want to take on board.

You can watch some of Lauren’s interview here: A perfect 7 wins a Postgraduate University Medal: