Hello all, I’m Ken and I’m part of the Shure-Gird Program. In this program we helped create education material for students to help them consider cybersecurity when engineering. I enjoyed my experience with the program, and I met a lot of great people. The Shure-Grid program greatly changed my understanding of scholarly work. Before I attended the program, I believed that research was analyzing data and coming to conclusions based on this data. However, the Shure-Grid program greatly differed from these expectations. We did do some level of data analysis, but most of our work related to getting information from industry professionals and coming to conclusions based on this information. We had to figure out how to convey this information in a way that is easier to understand for a general audience. I did not realize how important this is as if we cannot convey our points in a clear manner, our work could go unnoticed. Another aspect that changed my understanding of research was the involvement of faculty in regard to the work we did. I thought that research was primarily an independent expedition. However, in our program we had constant involvement among faculty members to aid in our project and give us valuable feedback. I believe that the most valuable part of this experience was learning how to effectively communicate in professional settings. Our group had to present our findings weekly to professors which forced me to be able to convey my findings in a detailed, yet clear way. I learned how to be able to take criticism effectively as we constantly received pointers on where we could improve. Another area that I worked on was conducting interviews. The professionals that we interviewed were well regarded in their fields, so we had to be careful to ask questions in a respectful manner. Conducting interviews taught me the preparation that was needed to elicit helpful responses. Our group had to understand our research topic well enough to be able to construct questions that gave us insightful details. We kept our questions open ended to allow the professionals to use their full depth of knowledge. In my future I will use these skills to communicate effectively to other professionals in my field. I am planning to graduate at the end of this year, and I will most likely enter the workforce or go to graduate school. If I enter the workforce, I will most likely work in a software development field with my background in computer science. This program better rounded my professional abilities which I did not focus on previously. I would recommend this program to anyone who has an interest in cybersecurity and wants to improve their professional skill set.