The Linux Foundation regularly awards scholarships as part of its Linux Training Scholarship Program. In the five years that the Linux Foundation has hosted this program, it has awarded a total of 34 scholarships totaling more than $100,000 in free training to students and professionals. In conjunction with this program, we are featuring recent scholarship recipients in the hope that their stories will inspire others.
Kyri’ay Vanderpoel, 22, works as a helpdesk technician at Systeem Medical while studying computer science at the University of North Texas, where he is taking courses in Network Security, Cryptography, and Penetration Testing. He started using Arch Linux when he was 17, and he’s been learning about Linux ever since. Kyri’ay, a scholarship recipient in the Whiz Kids category, thinks a course in Linux will allow him to be more useful in his job and prepare him for his goal of working in a security-related field.
How did you become interested in Linux and open source?
I started putting together Bitcoin miners with Arch Linux when I was 17 and I fell in love. As a gamer, I didn’t have a reason to invest in a Linux machine until my sophomore year of college. I purchased a refurbished C720 Chromebook, installed Xubuntu to start with, and landed on Arch Linux again. I’ve been working with this machine extensively as well as the Debian network controllers we have set up onsite for clients at work.
What Linux Foundation course are you planning to take with your scholarship?
Advanced Linux System Administration and Networking (LFS230).
How do you expect to use the knowledge you gain from this course?
Understanding Linux networking is essential to all of the career paths I am pursuing. I am particularly interested in using the knowledge I gain from this course to set up a lab environment to practice virtualization deployment and penetration 
testing.
What are your career goals? How do you see a Linux Foundation course helping you achieve those goals?
My primary goal is to actively participate in the open source community for my career. Ideally, I would like to pursue a mix of virtualization, security, and programming. The course I am taking with allow me to foster networking skills that are applicable across these disciplines.
What other hobbies or projects are you involved in? Do you participate in any open source projects at this time?
I try to pursue hobbies away from technology since I spend so much time working with it. I enjoy recreational outdoor sports, jazz guitar, and travel, although much of my free time is spent learning. I have a solo project that I am working on that should be ready for GitHub in a month or two, but I am looking for active projects to work on alongside my own.
Read more:
Linux Foundation Scholarship Recipient: Erich Noriega, SysAdmin Superstar
Linux Foundation Scholarship Recipient: Eva Tanaskoska, Women in Linux
Linux Foundation Scholarship Recipient: Enrique Sevillano, SysAdmin Superstar
Linux Foundation Scholarship Recipient: Anthony Hooper, Whiz Kid
Linux Foundation Scholarship Recipient: Yashdeep Saini, Developer Do-Gooder
Linux Foundation Scholarship Recipient: Kiran Padwal, Kernel Guru
