I am sorry I just don't like computer science students who claim they want to learn x yet they never do jack squat outside the classroom that really really pisses me off I've beat up kids for that shit like bad when I should be shaking their hands because they are the next generation of incompetent developers and admins responsible for my livelihood.

I know I am a dick which is why I've had so many cookies stolen from me already but like if they are computer science majors and they want to go into cyber security and they can't fucking port scan or pass crack they don't know, how to sniff traffic, they are not smart and they do not want to learn I could do all that when I was a 12 year old script kiddie.

Honestly I hate the way pentesters do shit as well but I understand why they do what they do I wouldn't trust 60 percent of them. Why don't you just force them all to read a book on Kali and practice 300 some pages and being a tool monkey isn't that hard  and kick them out if they don't you don't want retards weighing you down. Ironically I'm not much older than you if not younger and I never had a college education or learned a single algorithm and I do pretty well for myself. But really man don't let that all inclusive faggy open campus feel good bullshit weigh you down. There are always more faggots on campus who saw Mr. Robot and now they want to be hackers and have mommy and daddy drop 10 grand a semester to be bad at it. I'm sure if you're any good some of them will listen keep them discard the rest you have no use for people who suck or don't want to learn.

Well I have to tell you practice VMs at your local uni are very different from the real thing. Mostly in the sense that like you dont have any SOC on your ass, you can't just run Nessus and portscan away outside of the DMZ assuming you could without it being obvious like chances are most of the good stuff is behind the ASA. I've found that writing scripts to do passive recon on their job boards, XSSing employees, doing a lot of recon on the web apps and spidering them and writing automated test cases in advanced, knowing what to look for from job boards for example ASP.NET but with an MVC that would mean I can't really out right dork it I can use the harvester and whatweb or WAD it for info then after I get enough recon on all the web apps I map all their domains what datacenters their shit is hosted on their clients who the people working are their employers I write some XSS bots to target the people with my smtp servers or fake fbs and linked ins.  I also write an automated test case for the web apps I see hoping for a server side vuln. Either way doing both at a time generally gets me in the passive recon I did before on the Job Boards help a lot why because I read documentation on the type of stuff they use I will know their back end DB commands I will know the directory structure of the web platforms they use I will know what network services they use so I already have a plan and then I just sit and wait and chip away at the network enjoying how soft it is but not being too loud leaving obfuscated malware, scripts, and cron jobs in my wake slowly but surely. Long story short like if your college is good they will teach you fuzzing and assembly and different attacks maybe some snort rules that's the best case scenario and that's considered really good. However penetration tests are nothing like real attacks in my opinion especially in a university environment because it's noisy, the client side vector is usually removed, and malware is not allowed. You have time limits that force you to do things no competent blackhat would. Long story short it really depends on what you want to do like if you want to be a skilled attacker in the literal approach you can't be so dependent on brute force if you want to be a tool monkey for a firm go ahead I'm not calling you stupid I'm being honest because I used to be noisy and rush that didn't get me anything good.

Would it be worth it if I already make good money? I don't really care about the financial aspect of things but were you put into challenging situations that you enjoy?

NumPy and Sci Py well my engineering friends swear by it. Clojure and R a lot of data scientists use it so it's good for math.
Haskell because as the guys said it's used by mathemeticians and it's so fun to code in like I have been influenced by it tremendously all of my code is as purely functional as possible

Yeah I know that but like the main part of the job is like managing big infrastructure with load balancing, config management, and shit like that