April 16, 2021
Dear Cybersecurity and Privacy community,
It’s been a bit frenetic; I know. There’s a lot of new stuff to do. Between transferring faculty members to the new school, interviewing new professors, starting a new curriculum, and introducing the school to the world (“Hello, World!”), it’s been amazing how much time I got to spend this semester talking with all of you.
You would think that, with summer break almost here, we would have more time for that. Rather than winding down the clock to a slower summer, SCP faculty and staff will use the next few months for a quick breather and assess where we are, then prepare to hit the ground running in the fall.
Next on my agenda is getting input from faculty and students on what services they would like to see in the new school. While the intercollege model that the institute has adopted for SCP has brought valuable opportunities, being the first in line for this new type of academic operation means we will also have to invent new ways of doing business. This is a good time for you to weigh in. If you are a student, what services do you wish we had? If you are an online student, what can we do to add value to your OMS-Cyber experience? My faculty colleagues are in the same boat: from budgetary and financial services to grant administration to laboratories to career advising and course scheduling, we will have to find new team members who can support SCP’s mission and operations. I’ll meet with SCP faculty members before the semester ends in two weeks to brainstorm. Everyone else will soon receive an invitation to a SCP community Town Hall, where we will have the same discussion with even broader participation. I hope to see you there.
Here’s a news item that may help kick off the Town Hall conversation: The recently announced reorganization of the institute’s corporate engagement model impacts the school and how we might be able to serve students at career fairs. Every college (and the institute) has its own career fair, so where do we fit in as an intercollege unit? What meaningful leads and relationships for job prospects can we help students with by using the school’s contacts with industry? It’s an exciting and interesting problem.
A note on curriculum topics: The second workshop from the Georgia Cybersecurity and Privacy Roadmap Taskforce will look at “Bridging the Cybersecurity and Privacy Workforce Skills Gap” on April 27, 2:30 – 4 pm EDT. You can find out more details and register to attend virtually by visiting https://gacybereducation.org/. Also, this fall the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering will introduce threads for their undergrad degrees (sidenote: they follow the College of Computing, which introduced threads for its bachelor’s in computer science in 2007 when I was dean). Cybersecurity will be one of the threads in the computer engineering bachelor’s degree. Third-year student Andrew Gonzalez shares an insightful glimpse of his experience taking cybersecurity courses.
The professor will be out this summer as far as my virtual open office hours are concerned. My weekly letters to you will become more irregular until we pick back up again in August. You can quiz me on what I’ve learned these first two semesters as chair of SCP today at 1 pm at my last session this semester, and I will always be an email or a Twitter DM away until we get together again in the fall. I hope it will be in person, but we are planning for any eventuality.
Thanks for reading. Good luck on finals and have a safe summer.
Sincerely,
Richard DeMillo
Charlotte B. and Roger C. Warren Chair of Computing
Chair, School of Cybersecurity and Privacy
Visit me at www.demillo.com
Follow me on Twitter @rad_atl and @richde
