My cohort consists of my team for the SHURE-Grid fellowship. I have spent the last 4 weeks on a steep learning curve with them, and we are all putting in hard work with customer discovery to learn about electrical equipment, standards put in place in the industry, cybersecurity aspects, and other topics that will be useful for coming up with our final solution. Since I am relatively new to business, coming from a computer science background, I hope to learn more about the business implications that arise from implementing secure cybersecurity measures. I want to be able to see the problem we are taking on from both a computer science and a business perspective, and try to come up with a solution that gets the best out of both worlds.
There are a lot of similarities between the project my team is doing and the project the other SHURE-Grid team is doing. For my team to properly justify the use of cyber-informed engineering in companies, we must learn about and weigh the trade-offs that the other team are exploring to come up with a valid solution. Trade-offs, especially when it comes to the financial aspect of them, have massive implications for designing a system. Different companies may have different priorities when it comes to where they want to invest their money, so both teams are going to have to find the right balance that is applicable universally in the industry. The main difference between our projects is that the other team are exploring a narrower, more technical set of topics, whereas my team has to take a broader perspective and explore a wider range of topics, dealing with both technical and policy aspects.
Some benefits of being in an interdisciplinary team is that I get to hear opinions on the project and the solution from a different perspective than how I see it as a computer scientist. This project brings together engineering, computer science, and business disciplines, so it would be naive of me just to view it from the computer science standpoint. Being with people that have different backgrounds and majors helps my team create a solution that benefits all of the disciplines involved with the project. However, some challenges may arise in the future if people with two different viewpoints disagree over which direction to go with the project. That is not something we have faced yet, but it might come up in the future.