CMDA Student Experience - Will Frankovich '24

Hi. My name is Will Frankovich. I'm a CMDA major specializing in cryptography. I'm graduating this spring in 2024. In the crypto/cyber track within CMDA, you learn a lot of skills that relate to cybersecurity, sending encrypted messages, how to keep data safe, which is extremely relevant in this modern world where the Internet facilitates all this communication, but at the same time, you don't want everyone to be able to read what you're saying. In addition to the mathematical concepts, we take some classes such as cyber law and the future of security, which facilitates the more backgrounds of what is cybersecurity and what is a secure environment. So using those different skills of the mathematical, hard concepts that we learn, in addition to the soft liberal arts side of what is security and what is cybersecurity, really is a good fusion to then create people who can both encourage the development of good hard technical security measures, but while also having the theoretical background to the defend why those situations are better than others and how to then create a better security environment. One thing I really like about CMDA is how interdisciplinary it is. So for example, with CMDA you have to know statistics, math, computer science, and this fusion of different disciplines really encourages the applications of CMDA to so many different fields. I do research with the Department of Fish and Wildlife, which is a completely different college from CMDA and also just a different field. They don't teach us anything about fish and wildlife research or anything like that. So one of the research topics I'm working on is shark conservation. Sharks are hard to track because when they go underneath the ocean, you can't find them. But using machine learning and statistical methods and mathematics that we learned in CMDA, we're able to have a much higher accuracy of actually understanding where these sharks are going, where to find them, what kind of populations are still there. Then we can also develop plans to then improve the conservation of these sharks in different parts of the world. Once again, the skills, the different fusions of CMDA such as statistics, math, and computer science really aids in the job prospects and opportunities outside of the school at Virginia Tech. So for example, my first internship was software engineering, which was with a bunch of computer science majors, also at Virginia Tech, which is interesting that the skills I learned in CMDA apply to other fields. Then also my next internship was at NASA, which was more doing statistics and machine learning for satellites and stuff like that, which was less computer science and more statistics and data science, showing that the skills you learn in the CMDA program here can apply to many different fields, regardless of which one you want to go into. Thanks to the CMDA department, I'm really excited to be graduating in the next couple of months and starting a job this summer. We'll see where the skills that the CMDA department has given me, where how they'll take me in this job and see where I'll be in a couple of years.