As I am wrapping up my summer of research at Pitt, I am beginning to reflect on what I have learned from this experience and how that has affected my future goals. I participated in the SHURE-Grid research fellowship, an interdisciplinary program where I got to explore situations surrounding real life cyber-attacks on critical infrastructure and analyze them within the guidelines of cyber-informed engineering (CIE) principles. This program is sponsored by the Idaho National Laboratory (INL), one of the Department of Energy’s 17 national labs, and at Pitt is a collaboration between the David C. Frederick Honors College, Swanson School of Engineering, and Office of Research.

My team decided at the beginning of the program to focus our efforts on the electric grid sector. We originally focused on vulnerabilities in the traditional electric grid as a whole, and then shifted to renewable energy, specifically solar power, for our second use case. Our team faced challenges with this topic as we worked through our research problem because none of us are power engineers. As a computer engineering student with some electrical engineering background, I was the one with the most experience on the subject and that wasn’t much. We had to put a lot of our efforts into learning how the electric grid and some of its specific components worked before we could even begin to tackle the problem of connecting the attack to cyber-informed engineering, and we would not have been able to reach this level of understanding without the help of the faculty experts running the program. At the end of the program, I feel I have gained a practical knowledge of power engineering and the electric grid that I never expected to have.

This experience has also given me practice and exposure to the world of media. As part of the interdisciplinary portion of this program, each team had a student who was in a media related field to create educational videos on our work over the course of the summer. Even though I wasn’t the one creating the videos, I still got to learn about the theory behind making good videos and storytelling in general. These lessons also included information and workshops on professional skills like presenting and interviewing. My confidence in my own communication skills had grown significantly since I started the SHURE-Grid program, which I am very grateful for since I have always considered this one of my weaknesses. These media and professional skill experiences were perhaps the most valuable part of this research experience because it is not something I got a lot of experience in during my normal classes.

Now that the fellowship is coming to an end, I am considering how this experience will affect my future career goals. Academically, the SHURE-Grid fellowship has me considering grad school more than ever because I find the field of cyber-security fascinating and know I would enjoy getting a more in-depth education in that field. However, I think that grad school and any further research from me are going to be things I keep in mind to come back to after I spend some time in the work force. I’ve known since choosing computer engineering as a major that I wanted to pursue software development, and I hope that I will get to pursue a career in that field, at least for a while, once I graduate. I know that my time as a SHURE-Grid fellow will prove to be very beneficial to me personally and professionally, and I am very grateful for the opportunity to have participated in the SHURE-Grid fellowship.