Subject Selection Help

what do you mean "apparently"? either you do or you don't...don't let family members persuade you to do something you don't wanna.
now with that being said, the a levels needed for that would definitely be maths, and computer science if your school offers it. Also further maths if you can do that would look good. other than that, your choice.

I need some help to select my subjects for A levels, apparently i would like to pursue penetration testing as a career ( basically cyber security) so i wanted to know what my pathway will be, what should course i choose for in University/ collage and stuff in those lines, any help would be much much appreciated.

English Literature for Analyzing, Sociology for social roles. and Psychology for Analyzing different minds.

wait i need that for an IT related job?

wait i need that for an IT related job?

No. I was just quoting what you could have for a broader mindset of humanity. Then you could do a foundation in IT or any other subject whilst knowing what society is all together.

No, I would suggest taking maths and computer science as it would be much more useful for this type of work and if you decided pen testing isn't something that actually enjoy, you would still have good foundations for other areas in computer science.

If you want to work in IT, don’t go to University. A computer science degree is basically just applied Maths and doesn’t teach you anything you’ll actually need in your career.

Go out into the world, find an apprenticeship (ideally) or an entry level job, code and get involved with open source projects as much as possible in your spare time and save yourself 3 years and a load of debt.

I hire new starters for IT roles all the time and the computer science graduates are at no advantage over ambitious and passionate amateurs.

Penetration testing is an extremely niche area. You may want to widen your net a little to avoid disappointment.

Why do you need “evidence from a university”? What about professional qualifications done on the job that are 100% relevant to what you are doing? Worth more than a bunch of applied mathematics modules that you’ll never use. My husband is a head of function for an IT company and his team has but 2 graduates (who are the among the weakest team members) Most of the best Ops guys he’s ever hired or worked with did not have degrees. He doesn’t have a comp sci degree and as I said is a head of function (after 8 years in the industry following a career change)

I think perhaps your family need to be enlightened somehow on the value apprenticeships have these days. However I suspect you may not be in the U.K.?

I would strongly suggest Computer Science. With pen testing and cyber security you’ll use that knowledge of computing theory, programming, environments, algorithms, data security and transfer, etc. Computer Engineering tends to be more around the design and development of hardware and firmware (some still consider it a subset of Electrical Engineering)So to go back to your original question Maths, Further Maths, Computer Science, Physics would be the typical subjects for this but you could get away with dropping the physics for something else to show some breadth. Psychology which someone suggested would be a good one because if you’re into the security side of things, having that insight into human behaviour would be helpful.Can you do an EPQ? I could see you doing some really interesting work bringing together the psychology of cyber criminals and the work of those trying to combat it.