Online Bachelor's Degree in Cybersecurity

Douglas Keevers: Welcome, everybody to the American Women’s College here at Bay Path. Today, I’m going to discuss a little bit with you about the Cybersecurity Degree Program here at Bay Path and especially at TAWC in our graduate program in cybersecurity.

My name is Doug Keevers. I’m the Academic Program Director for IT and Cyber. Once again, I want to take the time to welcome all of you here to Bay Path. I know that the field of cybersecurity is a very large field. And I know that many of you may have reservations about whether or not you’d be interested in cybersecurity.

And I just want to talk to you a little bit about the fact that– please keep in mind that the field itself is not technical. A lot of you think that it probably is. And, yes, there are certain degrees of technology and technology acumen that you need to have. But the nice thing about cyber and the interesting thing, like many other fields, is that it is a very, very broad field. And there are many things that you can do in cybersecurity.

I’m going to go into a few of the different majors or specializations, if you will, that we have here and the programs that I run. And if you have any questions about that, I ask you to please either reach out to myself personally or to your academic advisor. I am more than willing to get on a call with anyone to help you decide the track and some of the different opportunities you may look to have interest in or to pursue as part of your degree.

So a little bit about Bay Path. We’ve been established since 1987. We have a very relatively large student population. We are accredited by NECHE. That is the pronunciation of the word. It’s the New England Commission for Higher Education. We’re a career-focused organization.

So what does that mean? It means that everything that we do in our programs right now must be geared towards the ultimate result, which is to see you all graduate but, most importantly, to be able to find employment based on the skills and knowledge you learn throughout our programs here at the American Women’s College and at Bay Path University in general.

We do have an all undergraduate women’s university here– the acronym for that is TAWC, The American Women’s College– as well as our graduate programs that are gender inclusive, meaning that we take more than just women into the program. We admit anyone, of any gender, into the graduate program.

And our top programs in particular are online and accelerated. They’re six-week sessions. So we designed that specifically for working adults and so that you can obtain your degree in a faster, more efficient time frame as opposed to taking courses that span two and three months at a time.

So let me get into a little bit more about the Bachelor of Science in Cybersecurity. This is our common core. What we mean by the common core is that all of you who would come into a cybersecurity program here at the bachelor’s level would be working through each one of these courses. I apologize. I don’t have the names of the courses here. But as you can see, all of you, regardless of the major that you would choose– and I’ll go into the majors momentarily– all of you would work through these particular foundation courses, if you will.

And again, there’s not a lot of the math or the science or anything that you would expect out of the common core. This is just the common core to get you familiar with the field of cybersecurity. We have three tracks. One here is Risk Management. Apologize for the acronym, BSORM. That just stands for Bachelor of Science in Risk Management.

And as you can see here, once you complete the core, these are your specialization courses you would take in risk management. But what is risk management really about? It’s just about that. It’s about how people protect an organization and other individuals from risk.

And you’ll take courses in things like data privacy. You’ll take a course in risk management, cyber strategy. One of the reasons that we have you taking courses like that is because it is important that you understand that cyber is more than just, as I said earlier, tech. It’s really about also the business and the operations and how to protect people and how to protect data. So cyber strategy is one particular course where you’ll lay a strategy out for how you would, in a hypothetical situation, protect your organization or maybe how you would protect your organization from things like a phishing scam. Those are just some examples.

Project management– very important in cybersecurity. It’s very important for all of you in any industry or any major that you undertake. Individuals out there as part of our advisory board always stress that they really want people who understand how to work with others. So it’s important that you understand the basics and fundamentals of project management.

One of the other specializations we have here is information assurance. And information assurance relates back to what we call the CIA triangle. It’s about confidentiality, integrity, and availability. So information assurance is about that. It’s how, do we ensure that our information is protected? How do we make sure that it is held in confidence? How do we get that information back in the same format that we stored it perhaps in and make sure that the information has got some integrity behind it? Those are important things.

You’ll learn about data privacy. You’ll learn about cloud computing. It’s a very big field today. Everyone today stores a lot of information in G Drive or in Dropbox or in SkyDrive. So understanding some of the basics about cloud computing and how information is stored and how it is retrieved is important.

And then things like the Internet of Things, what does that really mean? How do sensors connect people? What do we mean by sensors and remote devices? Those are all things that you’ll study and learn about here in this particular specialization.

Our third specialization is digital forensics and incident response. This is more along the lines, for those of you who think about things like CSI. Digital forensics is about protecting or gathering information from devices that other people have had. How do you pull that information from those devices and prepare that information for use perhaps in court?

For those of you in legal study, working with attorneys, this is very important. There is a methodology that you have to follow in order to preserve data for use as evidence in court. So you’ll take courses in digital forensics, in cyber investigations, where you’ll look at different data, how it resides, where it resides, and how to bring it back. You’ll do work in mobile technology.

Again, all of us, everywhere we go today, we carry these with us. Make no mistake about it. They are a computer. And lots of data is stored and housed on these mobile devices today. So those are some of the things you’ll learn in this particular specialization.

Again, there are three– so the digital forensics, information assurance, and risk management. If you’re not sure which way to go, that’s perfectly fine. Most people don’t. And most students that I work with will change their direction sometimes once, maybe even twice, to determine what area of cyber they really enjoy the most.

Again, it’s a very, very wide field. It’s growing. It is not just the tech, the cryptography, or the biometrics, or the things that you think about when you say, wow, I really like cyber. There’s a lot of opportunity. But am I capable of understanding the technology? The answer to it is you absolutely are. It’s just that you need to understand some of the foundational elements to prepare you for a career in cyber.

But we’ve got you covered. So as long as you talk to your advisor, again, your advisor will always have the ability to reach out to me and provide you with my phone and email. And I’m more than happy to schedule time to speak with any of you.

So what does all this really mean for you all? Career opportunities. These are just a representative list of just some of the things that you can do with a career in cybersecurity. And again, don’t let the terminology scare you away. When we say security consultant or cyber auditor, these are things– cryptographer– a lot of times, people get anxious when they see these terms and say, wow, can I really see myself as a cyber analyst? What does that analyst really do? We’re here to help you with that. And I’m particularly interested in helping you to understand these different fields because, again, the field is just so big that none of us, including me, can even keep up with it.

One of the things, and the last thing, that I want to mention to you and why I believe that Bay Path is such a prominent and awesome university, not only to work for but to attend, is that my programs here at TAWC, The American Women’s College, and also our graduate programs are now certified through the National Security Agency as what we call a CAE, or a Center of Academic Excellence.

Folks, this is very, very important because what it means is that all of our curriculum and our outcomes and our student learning outcomes are all based on what the NSA feels are requisite knowledge in order to be in the field of cybersecurity or to work in the field of cyber. So this is not– and I repeat– this is not an easy thing to manage and maintain. My staff works very hard to maintain our accreditation with the NSA. And I personally attend a lot of events where I’m constantly awed by how great the field is growing and how massive the field has become.

We are the only undergraduate all-women’s university in the United States who is certified through the NSA. Our undergraduate and graduate programs are both NSA certified. We provide a lot of different resources. And these are just a few. As part of our NSA accreditation, we have things like cyber mentorship programs, where you can work with other people who have been in the field of cybersecurity for years and use them as a mentor to ask questions to and help you in your curriculum and in your career direction or trajectories.

We have a partnership with the Mass Cyber Center, where we utilize things like a SOC, Security Operations Center, internships, where you can actually work with others in a live cyber environment and do things like what we call live-range activities, where you’re actually working in a real environment with others to mitigate an attack or to understand an attack or to protect information or to, as we said in risk management, protect information or even, in information assurance, pull that information from another device or another location.

The other thing, too, is that we work with industry leaders. One of them is Cyberbit. Cyberbit has been named as one of the leaders in cybersecurity skills training. And what does that mean for you? As I said earlier, my staff and I work very hard to make sure that our courses are up to date. Cybersecurity changes every week. The terminology changes. The practices change. The frameworks and methodologies– excuse me– always change.

So what we have to do is, my staff and in my organizations, we have to stay current. And how do we do that? We leverage other organizations, like Cyberbit, to utilize their tools in our courses so that you can not only understand the terminology and do well in the courses but that you can learn the tools that are applicable in industry today.

And it’s important that you understand that. It’s more than just certifications. It’s about how you can learn to take the tools that we’re teaching you and apply them to the field of cybersecurity. And that’s important from an employer perspective as well because they’re going to ask you that when you apply for a job. Yes, it’s great to say, well, I have a Security+ certification. And then they ask you, well, what have you done? Well, I’ve really never worked in the field of cybersecurity. But I have a certification.

And in my opinion, that’s because the certs sometimes teach you what you need to learn to pass the test. They don’t give you enough of the insight into the tools and the methodologies that are used in a particular field of cybersecurity. So keep that in mind when you’re looking for certifications. And make sure your certifications– that you discuss that with your advisor because it’s important you take on the correct trajectory when you’re applying for these certifications so that they complement your career or your interest in cyber.

I want to take a few moments again to thank you all for spending some time with me today. I encourage each and every one of you to reach out to me at any time should you have any questions. And before I finish, I would like to turn this over to Anise to discuss a little bit with you about the actual process for how to apply for our program. I hope to see you in the program. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out. And thank you all again. Stay safe. Anise, I’ll turn it over to you.

Anise Fareed: Thank you, Dr. Keevers. My name is Anise Fareed. I’m the Director of Enrollment here at The American Women’s College. I wanted to very briefly go over how you can apply getting started. It just takes three easy steps.

We’ll need a completed application. We’ll want to see a GPA of 2.0 or higher. And then we just need official transcripts from either your high school or any and all regionally accredited universities or colleges that you’ve attended.

The application is very simple to fill out. You can usually fill it out with less than 10 minutes. I have a team of enrollment counselors who will be here to help you along the way, to talk to you about the programs. They can get you connected with Dr. Keevers if you have more in-depth questions. But we can help you get everything with your application together so we can get you started in one of our six terms.

Here, we also have the mailing address and the email address for transcripts. You’ll want to submit your official transcripts from your high school. Or if you’ve obtained 12 or more college credits, we don’t need your high-school transcripts, and we can just use your college credits. So we look forward to speaking with you. And thank you so much for spending some time with us this afternoon.

Douglas Keevers: Thank you, everybody. Have a great day. And please reach out with any questions you have. We look forward to seeing you enroll in Bay Path. And I look forward to seeing you in my program. Take care.