Hi! It’s Karlynn again. I am now at the end of my summer research experience, and I have learned so much. I am currently pursuing a major in Digital Narrative and Interactive Design, a minor in Italian, and a certificate in Digital Media. With a schedule full of media, communication, and language-based classes, you can imagine how little of a background I had in healthcare or the dams sector of our critical infrastructure. But through exploring these two topics as our research project, I gained a vast amount of knowledge of both of these fields. My team’s task throughout the program was to analyze two different topics to create two use cases and educational material surrounding those cases. I elaborate on our first use case, cybersecurity in healthcare with a focus on insulin pumps, more in my first blog post, but since then we have delved into learning about dam control systems as our second use case. When dams have such major purposes as flood prevention, irrigation, and even power generation, it’s clear to see how harmful a cybersecurity attack on one could be. Flooding, drought, and blackouts could be potentially fatal consequences. My team and I of course did not have prior experience or knowledge of how exactly a dam works, so we really had to go searching for details and explanations that could aid in our understanding and therefore creation of material. This process helped me to realize that my research, and really any research, is not the stereotypical idea of research. Most people would hear the word ‘research’ and think of someone in a lab coat and goggles mixing different chemicals together, or maybe even someone in a library poring over a mountain of books and scribbling down notes on what they find. While we did do plenty of reading, I found that research was more about thinking creatively to find problems that needed to be addressed, and then using all of the materials at our disposal to produce answers. A lot of times the greatest resource was our guiding faculty members, who always had helpful suggestions of paths to take in our research, as well as many helpful connections that we could talk to.

Talking to those connections helped me to develop one of the skills I found most valuable in this program. Because we were developing material on the up and coming field of Cyber Informed Engineering, that meant there were not a ton of clear-cut explanations for us to find online. This is when it was helpful to reach out to a faculty members’ contact, who were experts in their fields and had the ability to explain the dense material to us in a way that helped our understanding. We were able to talk to a doctor about medical practices pertaining to implantable medical devices, and an engineer who used to work with the dams system of Niagara Falls explained to us how those facilities worked. My team and I were able to get answers we couldn’t find online, and that showed me the value of being able to conduct interviews. Something else I learned to do in this program that I think will be very beneficial to me was learning how to present professionally. As you can imagine working with cybersecurity and engineering, there are a lot of very technical terms being used. We had to learn how to take all of the technical information we were finding, and condense it down and translate it into something that could be presented to a room full of people who all might have different backgrounds and skill sets. We had weekly meetings where we presented to our faculty members as well as the other students in the program. These meetings helped with not only learning how to communicate our work, but also with getting more comfortable with public speaking. They also prepared us for our final presentation where we presented our final outcomes to the sponsors of our program.

From this experience, I hope to take those valuable skills I learned and use them to help secure an internship and then eventually a job. Even though I don’t plan to go into cybersecurity, I think these are very useful skills in any job I might have, especially as I plan on still being in the tech industry. I think by participating in this program, the skills I’ve learned here will be very desirable to future employers. And those skills should still help me before then, as I enter the second half of my college career. I should now be more comfortable presenting in my classes, as I often have to give many presentations on the different projects I work on in those classes. I also will end up doing a capstone project my senior year, and the principles of research I learned this summer will undoubtedly help me with that as well. Overall, I am very thankful to have had this opportunity.