New camp for high school students explores cybersecurity
A new program this summer helps high schoolers learn more about Miami, the Farmer School of Business, and cybersecurity.
When the Farmer School of Business Department of Information Systems and Analytics decided to create a program in cybersecurity, associate professor Joseph Nwankpa says, it turned out that to a large extent, they already had.
“We realized that even though our students were graduating with information system degrees, they were getting careers in cyber, and that was based off of our curriculum,” he said. “We were already graduating students that were passionate about cybersecurity.”
Last week, Nwankpa and the ISA department joined forces with the FSB Passport program, as well as US Bank and EY, to host the first ISA/Cyber Camp for high school students.
Like the Miami Accountancy Program held each summer, the Cyber Camp is designed to introduce high school students to the profession and to a college experience at the Farmer School of Business.
Sia Harris knows about both programs. The Walnut Hills student attended the accountancy camp earlier this summer. “I would like to work in healthcare as a risk assessment or insurance assessment professional,” she said.
But Harris noted that her desire to work with numbers fit well with this camp as well. “I really wanted to do cybersecurity because I wanted to work in law, but I also wanted to do statistics. So I wasn’t sure how to converge that. I thought about business analytics and it was a perfect match because I could do data but also present it to businesses in risk assessment,” she said.
Students went to classes about current technology, encryption, and product security, took part in team building exercises, heard from EY professionals about their work, visited the U.S. Bank Cybersecurity Center in Cincinnati, and put together a presentation on their experience to show their parents at the end of the camp.
Carroll High School’s Theodore Hubbard said he’d already been thinking about going to college at Miami. “I actually learned about this camp from my mom and I thought it was going to be a good thing to do because I was thinking about doing computer science coming here,” he said. “I didn't really know anything about cybersecurity or ISA, so I wanted to learn about it.”
“My mindset has really been altered. It was really interesting learning about how there's two sides to cybersecurity -- one is more technical and that deals with all your engineers who are developing things and products,” Hubbard said. “But then you also have the business side and that's the main part that intrigued me because it's all about making sure that the businesses the risk of what could possibly happen to them and the people are using that code to help show that.”
“The most interesting things that I've learned were at US Bank -- the different job sectors, even within cybersecurity. I didn't know that you could be a forensic analyst and I didn't know that you could just do that with a IS degree,” Harris said.
“It really comes down to your passion. Are you passionate about cybersecurity?” Nwankpa said. “That's so key because if you hone your skills so much on the technical components, the challenge is that cybersecurity is constantly evolving, which means that the skillset you have today might not necessarily be the skillset that we need to solve a problem tomorrow.”
