Amanda Ryerse [senior major in Electrical Engineering with a minor in Political Science, Class of 2018]: Well, growing up I grew up in the DC area, so I've always known about the defense industry and kind of the intelligence. And cyber's been a big field that's been growing, and I've always found it interesting, and then this summer I got the opportunity to work for Booz Allen Hamilton, who is a defense contracting company in management consulting, and I got to do internal cyber security for them, so handling all internal threats to systems, to computers, and it was fascinating and I learned so much, and it was cool because they use intelligence, cyber intel, but they also use, they handle incidents — so anything that affects Booz Allen they have to, they’re in charge of handling. So that was really great.
And so they do a bunch of different stuff, like anything to do with the government, they're usually there. And so, but growing up in the DC area, most people have never heard of the company, even though it's a huge 25,000 people firm, and most people have never heard of it. But because I grew up in the DC area I've kind of been around the industry, and so that was something. I had always liked the company, and I think they do a lot of cool work. I kind of applied, reached out to a couple people at the company, and it kind of progressed from there. I interviewed and got the position.
So, I worked for the cyber incident response team, which handles internal threats to Booz Allen. And so they are comprised of three different sub-teams, and so they use those three sub-teams to triage events and handle incidents but also work with other people to gather knowledge and intel and stuff.
So I kind of was working with them on the technical side, but also I got to do some project management, so it was kind of a bit of both. Definitely a little more related to engineering as far as the technical side, but it helped that I knew what was going on in the world.
I took some Politics of the Middle East, I took that class, and that kind of … terrorism was a big topic we talked about in that class because obviously it affects that region. And so we had talked about that, and it kind of progressed from there.
[March 2018]