Spotlight Mentoring Interview: Niyati Daftary (Mentee of the Month February 2022)

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1. Niyati, would you be able to introduce yourself to our readers?

Career: I am a cybersecurity professional with 2.5 years experience in this field working for a global corporation. I love to suggest new mitigations and security policies to safeguard the big and small companies.

Hobbies and interests: Travelling, Reading, Writing, meeting new people and learning amazing stories about them.

What people say about you: Extremely outgoing, humble and helpful. Energises the people around her.

2. Can you explain more about your work and career journey? What made you want to get started in your career?

It was a luck by chance discovery of this field, but I get to learn new things, new attack vectors and new methodologies everyday, so the daily challenges mademe explore more and got me started in this career field. I took external CISCO certifications, Fortinet Certifications, AWS and Azure Cloud Certifications and EC-Council’s CEH certification to get where I am now. Everyday when you practically perform things, learn using different tools, encounter different situations, you seek advice from seniors and google, study and learn things, so this is how I have grown. Also, these extra efforts undertaken by me earned me an early promotion and 2 awards at my previous firm.

3. Can you share your favourite part of your job role and what keeps you motivated to keep going?

Meeting people more knowledgeable than you and them guiding you and teaching you about new topics daily is what keeps me motivated, also the happiness I get when I help make the infra of a big company more secure, pushes me to work and achieve even more greater heights.

4. Can you tell our readers about some positive and negative experiences have you faced during your career journey?

Positive: Constant learning, supportive mentors and seniors, opportunities to attend multiple conferences and see the world from a different perspective.

Negative: Burnouts, exhaustion and zero work-life balance.

5. How did you discover PushFar and what does mentoring mean to you?

I went through a series of apps but PushFar is the only one which provided free mentorship along with goal tracking, that is why I love this app. I was pretty new and needed career insights, soft skills insights, wanted to develop a side hustle, but I wanted someone experienced and senior to help me and guide me and lay a roadmap to ease my journey. This made me look for a mentor, and as a way of giving back, I wanted to share my knowledge and help newbies in the field of cybersecurity that is why I donned the mentor hat too.

6. Can you share some mentoring experiences you’ve had in your life?

I am both a mentor and mentee, but I have had 2 mentoring meetings till now, the first one taught me mindfulness and how to stay calm and deal with any situation, the second one made me realise what I exactly wanted in life and gave me weekly assignments to overcome some of my fears in achieving them.

7. Would you recommend a mentoring relationship to people?

Definitely, everyone should have a mentor in life who can guide them, who they can look upto as role models, actually this simplifies your journey a little bit and saves you the time as you would have to build everything from scratch instead of taking anyone’s advice.

8. What is your best advice for someone looking to become a mentor or mentee?

Listen, understand and show faith in your mentees. This will generate hope and trust within them which will make the whole process even more amusing and simple to achieve the final results. Also ask the mentees what they are expecting at the end of mentorship, that will help you prepare and directly dwell on those topics, saving time for both of you.

9. Can you share your best piece of advice to our readers in a similar job role as yourself?

Don’t be scared of anything, ask questions, try new things in different ways and keep learning daily, no matter what, just keep going and have a mission or purpose in life that will keep you on track and make your life more meaningful.