Every once in a while someone is asking about working in RE-related field - what it's like, how to start, what to study, etc. 

I personally think this is a good summary: https://medium.com/@laparisa/so-you-want-to-work-in-security-bc6c10157d23

 

Pinned! I should probably add a link to this or something similar in the FAQ...

Ted.

Everything in the article rings true, from my personal experience.

I initially got into RCE before I took any classes at college, and it has helped out my education and early career a ton. I have been employed for a couple years, doing general software development, about to pivot into something more security/reversing focused. The concepts learned here and other forums that were active a few years ago, made it possible to cruise through my college degree without any problems, and I was able to secure a full time job before I graduated. Security knowledge makes you a better programmer in general as well. Knowing the opcodes your compiler will translate your code into can help you optimize areas of your code, and you can solve problems with snippets of asm, and other neat tricks used in reverse engineering, those other developers don't know about. You can fix some bugs faster because you think about the problem different than everyone else.

I recommend doing the cryptopals challenges for anyone serious about cryptography and that side of security.