Melissa Bischoping took the scenic route to a career in tech

Sometimes you end up taking the scenic route to get to the right destination.

That’s what Melissa Bischoping found in her journey from single mother to head of threat research and intelligence at AI platformer Tanium. The key, as she sees it, is ensuring that you don’t miss the chance once it comes.

“If you are ready and if you’re willing, and if you say yes to those opportunities when they come across, you’re going to be able to make something of them,” Bischoping told IT Brew.

All the way back to high school, Bischoping had a knack for computers, but didn’t consider it a profession until later in life. Instead, she concentrated on what she saw as a more stable option when she went to college in the early 2000s.

“I didn’t focus on computer science because I didn’t think that I had the time and the energy to devote to that kind of academic rigor at that time,” Bischoping said. “I ended up picking nursing to begin with.”

Circuitous route. Bischoping earned a psychology degree, aiming to go into research psychology. But the cold, hard reality was that a bachelor’s degree in psychology didn’t get her far at first. She ended up as a receptionist at a real estate office, stamping envelopes and answering phones. It wasn’t what she wanted.

“I knew I wanted to do more, I knew I had creative ideas, I knew I was built for something [more],” Bischoping said. “I was talking to a friend of mine—who’s become quite a mentor—who said, ‘You know, you’d make a great IT project manager.’”

Inspired, she went back to school for an IT degree. Cybersecurity exercises like capture the flag indicated tech discipline could be a good fit; the gamified, competitive nature of dealing with threats and providing protection activated the reward system in her brain.

Development. Once back in school, Bischoping found opportunities in the cybersecurity sector, landing an internship at a casino in the Shreveport, Louisiana, area where she and her family were living. That led to a desktop support role at another casino in the area; after that, she worked for Calumet Specialty Products Partners, a hydrocarbon production company, for just over two years.

The time was right for more education, this time, a master’s from SANS Institute that she started in 2020, the same year she joined Tanium as an enterprise services engineer. Bischoping achieved her current leadership position in April; she’s been a SANS board member since January and started teaching there last month.

Helping hands. When she thinks about her path to tech success, there’s one way that Bischoping wants to continue to pay it forward: sharing her experiences with early career staff and giving them the same support she received.

“I never miss the opportunity to champion the value of bringing in individuals from non-traditional backgrounds,” Bischoping said. “Our recruiting teams industry-wide tend to focus [on] certain target schools or target majors. But I’m proof that there are very capable, powerful leaders and stories to be told that may be coming in a side door—they may have also taken the scenic route.”