Research Analayst
The National Science Foundation (NSF) is a United States government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National Institutes of Health. With an annual budget of about US$7.0 billion, the NSF funds approximately 24% of all federally supported basic research conducted by the United States’ colleges and universities. I worked in the criminal justice department for Dr. Rege conducting research regarding the observational approach to defending against cyber attacks.
My team spanned 7 people, including two other MIS majors, 2 computer science majors, as well as 2 liberal arts majors. My team was responsible for observing penetration testers hack simulated environments with the hopes of being able to gain a deeper understanding of the thought process of what a malevolent hacker would be thinking during an attack. During our observations we recorded quantitative and qualitative data and later cleaned, organized, and analyzed this data in groups.
Our project was not finished during my time working for NSF, but my accomplishments included organizing and cleaning the large amounts of data that the seven of us collected during our two data gathering outings. Before the end of my work experience, we managed to do preliminary analysis on the data regarding our findings, and sent our analysis to our sister group in at the Rochester Institute of Technology for comparison against their findings. After our work experience, our findings were presented at TURF-CreWS Temple. Further questions regarding the outcome of our work can be directed towards Dr. Rege of Temple University’s Criminal Justice Department.
I learned a lot and thoroughly enjoyed m experience working on our NSF Research Project. First and foremost, I learned what it is like to work with a multidisciplinary team. As there were three different colleges being represented on our team, we all brought different skills as well as different ways of thinking to the table, and synthesizing all of this knowledge in order to be successful in our research was a challenge in and of itself. I learned the importance of being cross-functional, meaning being able to do the work that would have normally been expected of the CS or CLA majors on the team, that for one reason or another they were not able to do. This is something that I believe to be especially important for students majoring in MIS, considering the nature of the major and how wide it is in breadth regarding soft skills and technical skills. Finally, I learned more than I ever could have imagined regarding penetration testing and the thought processes behind it. I learned about exploits, common procedure, as well different programs and services that can be used to ethically hack. My experience is one that I very much appreciate having had.