New cybersecurity camp encourages girls to pursue STEM careers
Nikita Rajkumar witnessed multiple layers of cybersecurity diversity at summer camp.
“Hearing from all these women who work around cybersecurity is encouraging because there isn’t just one way to do it,” said Rajkumar, an eighth grader.
Rajkumar was one of 20 middle and high school girls who attended the first CyberGirls @ Virginia Tech summer camp, hosted by the Virginia Tech National Security Institute in collaboration with the Center for the Enhancement of Engineering Diversity.
During the week-long day camp, the girls were introduced to topics like cyber security, data science, cryptography, and network security by female faculty members from the Virginia Tech National Security Institute.
“The idea for this camp was really born from female faculty coming together and talking about different ways to support girls and women in getting into the STEM space and into cyber,” said Stephanie Travis, director of the Senior Military College Cyber Institute at the Hume Center for National Security and Technology.
Travis said many of the core competencies students need to pursue STEM - science, technology, engineering and math – careers, such as calculus and physics, are now often pushed earlier in the education pipeline. This can make it difficult for students to join once they are behind.
“One of the things we really wanted to do was encourage them to stay in that space and not sell themselves short when they're fully capable of working in that space,” she said. “At their age, sometimes, someone has told them it's not cool or it's too hard. We wanted to show them they could do it, not just by showing them core competencies, but also by introducing them to our female faculty and our female guest speakers who all work in this space.”
Presentations included speakers from M.C. Dean Inc., Microsoft Corporation, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Office of the Director for Developmental Test, Evaluation, and Assessments.
“It really showed us that there are so many areas you can go into,” Rajkumar said. “I thought it might only be coding, but it’s not. We also heard from people who work in policy and AI [artificial intelligence] and a lot of different areas.”
The girls were taught through a mix of lectures with learning activities on laptops and hands-on activities that demonstrated cybersecurity ideas. For example, one activity was a game where the girls were connected to each other using strings and had to pass notes back and forth through the appropriate paths - modeling a network of routers connecting to the internet.
“We’re learning a lot but we’re also having fun,” Rajkumar said. “I’ve also made a lot of friends this week who I never would have met because we go to different schools. It’s nice to have these people that we have so much in common with because we’re interested in these careers.”
The camp adhered to the GenCyber model and was funded through the Senior Military College Department of Defense Cyber Institute grant from the National Centers of Academic Excellence in Cybersecurity.
The camp will be put on again in Arlington next year with funding from the same program. With additional sponsors, Travis hopes future camps can be expanded to the Blacksburg area.
To learn more about partnering with CyberGirls @ Virginia Tech, contact: CyberGirls@vt.edu
