Every cyber-career video says "it's the soft skills." Almost none of them show you what that actually looks like. So here's mine: I caught data-integrity failures in a vendor's returned results, took the finding to three different rooms, and watched them change their process. That's the one skill that quietly carries a data analyst into a SOC — and you already have more of it than you think.

The terminal stops being scary the moment you realize it's just asking questions. Ten years of querying data, and my first real Linux command line turned out to be full of familiar instincts — plus a few places where that familiarity ran out.