Expectations vs Reality - Digital Forensic Science Master's Degree

January 2022, I started my first course at Champlain College to complete my Master’s Degree in Digital Forensic Science. I’ll be making a few posts related to my experience with the coursework and my takeaways. It’s important to remember that everyone entering this program came from diverse professional and personal backgrounds. This diversity was both a strength and a challenge. On one hand, it sparked valuable discussions and brought differing viewpoints. On the other hand, students had widely varying expectations and skill levels, which led to inconsistencies in the perceived difficulty and usefulness of the courses. I mention this as my background will influence my viewpoint and my experience is and will be different from others. These posts are not meant to be a review of the program; but a recap of my experience and learning.

DFS-500 Digital Forensic Science

A definite introduction course that touched lightly on multiple different topics ranging from evidence acquistion to report writing. As this was an introduction course, the assignments were very easy from a technical standpoint consisting mainly of correctly running various tools and interpreting their output. To put it bluntly, this is your typical weed-out course to figure out if you are interested in the field and have the time to devote to complete the coursework.

My main takeaway was the importance of report writing and presenting findings to an audience be it a jury or leadership. The final assignment was creating a jury presentation based on your report and findings from the previous hands-on investigation lab. Being comfortable giving regular presentations to leadership and coworkers on various topics made this assignment much easier. I was able to focus on what needed to be disseminated and the best way to present it to a non-technical audience.

Software Used

• Autopsy
• ProDiscover Basic
• OSForensics
• Ophcrack (Used for extra credit to decipher an NTLM Hash)

I’ll be making similar posts about all the other courses in the program that I took. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions. I will not help you with your assignments though.