How a Question About Phishing Turned Into a Calling by Humza

How a Question About Phishing Turned Into a Calling by Humza - October 2026 Scholarship Essay

My curiosity has always started with a question nobody around me could answer. In my case it was: how do phishing scams actually work? Not the vague warnings adults give you about not clicking links, but the real mechanics. What makes a fake login page convincing? Why do some scam texts feel obviously fake while others make your stomach drop?

I started reading about social engineering the way other kids read about dinosaurs, and the more I learned, the more I realized the attackers were winning because nobody was building defenses for ordinary people. So I built BaitCheck, a tool that analyzes suspicious texts, emails, and URLs and gives a plain-English risk score. The hardest problem was misclassification: my early version scored "this is not a scam, download this link" as safe. Fixing it meant learning how scammers use language itself as a weapon — protestations of legitimacy, manufactured urgency, secrecy.

That rabbit hole pulled me into cybersecurity properly, and now it is what I want to study in college. What I love about this field is that curiosity is the job. Attackers invent new tricks every week, which means defenders have to stay curious forever. I want to spend my career being the person who keeps asking how the trick works, so that the people who never learned to ask — somebody's parents, somebody's grandparents — stay safe anyway.