“When I got out of the military, like most veterans, I didn't really know where I wanted to go because my job in the military didn't really translate to anything out in the civilian world,” begins Quentin Sanders, who served as a Combat Engineer for the Marine Corps for four years.

After enrolling in culinary school at the University of Alaska, then studying in Nashville for a while, Quentin eventually landed in Orlando to attend Full Sail University. “[At first] I was like, ‘That's a film school! What's going on with this? Last I knew they were just film and music.’ Obviously, after looking on Full Sail's website and looking at the course, I was like, ‘Wow, they have a whole [Cloud Technologies] degree now.’”

Quentin was hired as a Solutions Analyst for Deloitte immediately after graduating from Full Sail’s Cloud Technologies program (now the Cybersecurity bachelor's program). But his career skyrocketed when he began working for the aerospace and defense company Lockheed Martin. “I am the DevSecOps engineer, which means I just do a lot of interesting things. I use all the tools, so I don't just do one thing. We do everything.”

“There’s a lot of grunt work in there, too,” he shrugs modestly.

Quentin says his Full Sail education helps keep him grounded and focused throughout the many challenges that come with his position. Patience and excellent problem-solving skills are two of the top lessons he relies on daily.

“Doing the classwork at Full Sail, you're given a broad list of things you need to do – and you need to figure out how to actually do those things. It's the exact same thing I do right now. [I have] the Full Sail knowledge of understanding, ‘Okay, I need to do this now, let me write down my steps to how to get to the end goal of doing this.’”

Quentin loves his job and enjoys learning and using all the software required to excel – like Ansible and GitLab. “Being able and willing to learn once you get hired is very important,” he advises any current Full Sail students interested in landing a DevSecOps role after graduation.

“The knowledge you learn at Full Sail is good enough to get you in the door. But you need to understand that once you get in this door, the first thing you should do is pick up another book and keep learning.

“I go into the office twice a week and each day I go in, it's always like, ‘I can't believe I'm here. This is crazy,’” he laughs.

Despite his success at Lockheed Martin, Quentin isn’t quite ready to settle. Currently, he’s planning on going back to Deloitte to work on projects in partnership with the US government.

He hopes to return to Full Sail one day to help students hone their interview skills so that they can put their best foot forward when meeting recruiters.

When it comes to impressing interviewers from companies like Deloitte and Lockheed Martin, Quentin keeps it pretty simple. “I think interviews are not that difficult. I think there's a lot of prep that people do to go into the interviews that you probably can cut back on for yourself and just talk about the stuff you already worked on.”