How to get into Cybersecurity

A quote I think about a lot is, "Any sufficiently caveated advice is indistinguishable from chaos." With that in mind, there will be no further caveats in this post. This post is about how I started my career in cyber security and what worked for me, I may add comments about ideas that seemed promising that I never had to implement or was too lazy to implement, but as a whole, this is what I did. You can ignore this, parse what is valuable from here, or take it as gospel.

Halfway through my senior year of high school, I was told I wouldn't graduate, I had missed too many classes, and my semester would not count. I was terrified of what that meant for my future, for about 30 minutes. I had already been accepted to a few colleges, one of which my parents worked as administrators, and one had a unique cybersecurity program I knew I wanted to be in for years. By the end of the week, I was enrolled at my parents' college for the spring semester, and in the fall, I went to my target school, majoring in computer science, as if nothing had happened. Halfway through my first semester at my target school, I started getting emails about a formality needed to enroll for the next semester, my final transcript with proof of graduation. I let this eat at me for at least a month, convinced I would be kicked out, but I finally went and talked to admissions. They were understanding and told me I had two options: take the GED or apply for a homeschool diploma. I did neither of these. I looked at the homeschool credit requirements for my state and found through AP credits, I had met the requirements by the end of my junior year, my dad made a transcript with the accurate grades and credits I had, but I didn't actually apply, I just gave that transcript to my university, and they said it was all they needed. These were my first forays into the realization that requirements and qualifications weren't as strict as they appeared.