Contrary to the intuition of some administrators and teachers, holding students to high standards improves retention. Establishing expectations early improves the classroom atmosphere because students are much more willing to help other students who put in a serious effort, and because instructor time is not wasted on students who don’t. Students graduating from a rigorous program are much more likely to have a true understanding of the material. This gives them confidence and leaves them prepared for competitions.

A brief outline of the student development research projects being conducted by University of Memphis students associated with CAE federally funded research grants.

BYU has recently signed an MOU with a vendor. The vendor partners with institutions and offers to faculty, staff, and students of higher education institutions access to vital cybersecurity skills training and learning resources. It provides students with real-world experience in multiple fields of cyber security such as Cloud, Network, and endPoint. The program is free of charge as the vendor aims to provide vital cybersecurity skills and learning resources in order to close the field’s workforce gap.

Our program has a constant struggle to get our students placed in meaningful internship opportunities. We have all heard the response all too often: Are they in their junior or senior year in college? We only offer internships to 4 year institutions. Then there is the management of paperwork and tracking of which student is at what location and how many hours are they logging there. We had enough and we are building our own paid internship opportunities for Tier 1 SOC Analysts. We are calling it the GSOC. Gaucho Security Operation Center.

Missoula College University of Montana has completed the inaugural year of a CAE-CD rapid training program. Our CAE-CD Program of Study (PoS) encompasses four classes covering networking, operating systems, basic cybersecurity, and ethics/legal issues in computer science. Recognizing the need for short term training programs (i.e., completed within six months), Missoula College has developed a 10-15 week course of study specifically designed for individuals to get a jump-start on transitioning to a career in cybersecurity.

This presentation outlines how we use our Cyber Capstone Classes to access both the Program Learning Outcomes (PLO) and competencies of our graduating seniors. At USD, we found that local businesses were reluctant to allow students the opportunity to evaluate, and implement security on an operational system. We developed the USD Cyber Cloud (a private cloud using OpenStack) to have an isolated sandbox that can be quickly configured to give the student (Student Teams) a fully functional business network system.

Cybersecurity competency is essential for securing jobs in federal agencies and industries. To ensure students are prepared for the workforce, universities should emphasize work skill readiness. This research proposes using large language models (LLMs) like Chat-GPT to extract skills from course materials and job postings. The extracted skills can then be cross-referenced with grades received to select the perfect candidate for a given task. Compared to other LLMs, Chat-GPT meets several important requirements such as speed, low cost, frequent updates, and robust APIs.

The latest advancements in generative AI have created both beneficial and harmful opportunities. Novice attackers can now quickly develop multiple variations of malware to evade anti-malware detection tools and can even use advanced technology like ChatGPT to create harmful programs from scratch. Generative AI tools can easily produce human-like content, such as speech and text, to create phishing emails and social engineering attacks.

The need for cybersecurity workers is clear. With a documented current shortage of cybersecurity workers in the U.S. identified as over 300,000 openings, the need to attract, and retain more future cybersecurity workers could not be more clear. Many efforts have been created to address this need and have had clear positive results.

Professional organizations are defined as a group that furthers a particular profession, those engaged in that profession, and the public interest. As part of furthering the profession, many professional associations have created programs to perform outreach to colleges and universities. Faculty and student clubs can benefit from connecting with their local chapters of the major professional associations, such as ISACA, ISSA, and ISC2.