SIUE Hosts Cybersecurity Careers Workshop for High School Students
March 22nd 2024, Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville hosted over 100 Metro East high school students for a half-day cybersecurity careers workshop, the Secure Pathways Series from the Security Advisor Alliance. The event was held in partnership with the Gateway Higher Education Cybersecurity Consortium (GHECC). The workshop series is designed to inspire a diverse and inclusive nationwide talent pool to prepare for careers in cybersecurity, and to build a bridge between that talent, and the needs of industry, academia and government.
Tim Jacks, head of the Masters of Cybersecurity program at SIUE hosted the event and provided outstanding facilities in the Illinois Room on campus. Allowing students to see environments like these, inspire futures in technology.
Mentors from companies like Mastercard, Protiviti, Caleres, STLCC, and more spent nearly 4 hours with students from several local high schools. The day kicked off with a discussion between mentors and students around the role cybersecurity plays in a business, and how many areas it reaches. The students worked through scenarios that real cyber professionals encounter and made decisions on how to keep their companies resilient.
Cyber professionals also shared how critical skills like communications, problem solving, and collaboration are key to the success of their team members. Students talked about risk, how to mitigate it through policy and procedure, and the jobs those skills lead to within cyber organizations.
Students assigned themselves teams for the Capture The Flag exercise, often mixing the schools and groups of students. The Alliance capture the flag experience is designed to gamify learning and reinforce analytical thinking skills, teamwork and creativity in problem solving. Questions ranged from simple multiple choice challenges, to much more difficult flags with multiple steps and an attention to detail required to succeed.
Mentors kept a close eye on each team and made sure that students learned the desired skills and tools.
“It was a joy to volunteer with the Security Advisor Alliance! The students at the Secure Pathways Workshop were engaged the entire time between watching short videos, playing capture the flag, and having time to discuss questions with our panel of professionals. They were all incredibly bright and it was time well spent!” - Shauna Teague
After a pizza lunch, students spent time asking career related questions of the professionals to gain better insight into the skills needed for their future. Alliance staff connected with the high school educators and provided ongoing resources including our open source toolkit for scaling our reach into schools.
The Alliance would like to thank Mastercard, Cisco Secure, Netskope and Palo Alto Networks for their support in 2024. These types of programs simply wouldn’t be possible without your partnership.
