L - Leadership
I earned my leadership credit through the completion of my Philosophy 355E course: Cybersecurity Ethics.
Importance
Naturally, as a young cybersecurity professional, understanding cybersecurity ethics is crucial to my future in the field. This course allowed us to examine issues ranging from information warfare to the conflicts between engineering ethics and business best practices. We examined these conflicts through different ethical theories, allowing us to develop different ethical opinions related to these issues. Beyond the importance of cyberethics for my future career, it is important to acknowledge just how important this class is for anyone aspiring to be a leader in the field. A more well established understanding of ethics not only allows for me to make informed ethical decisions for the good of those whose systems we are trying to protect, but it also helps to mediate arguments between anyone falling under my leadership as I can better understand different ethical views on topics thanks to having learned the different theories.
Context
Philosophy 355E, Cybersecurity Ethics, focused primarily on independent learning. I really liked the concept that was used for class where we would need to use an ethical theory, a "tool", in order to solve case studies that were given to us. In order to get access to these tools, we would need to read a story and write an analysis of how that story taught us an ethical theory. Only after this analysis and proving that we understood the tool were we able to use that viewpoint to solve the case study. It was unique and a great way to learn theories such as confuianism, virtue ethics, and consequentialism. The goals of the class were to analyze ethical problems and make decisions based on ethical principles to solve them and then take this knowledge and apply it specifically to cybersecurity. This course also gave us further insight into the most common ethical issues found in cybersecurity and encouraged us to deliberate about these issues by articulating our opinions based on what we had learned.
Development
This class helped with my professional development substantially as I was not nearly as well versed in the ethics of cybersecurity as I believed myself to be going into the course. Not only do I use the lessons learned in many other classes in my college career, but I have found the course incredibly useful in getting deeper understandings of speakers at Cybersecurity conferences I've attended, like Cyberforge 2025 as a recent example. I feel that this class set me up for success and improved my capacity to learn from many other events, which I wouldn't realize until long after the class ended. I would recommend that any new cybersecurity students take it as soon as possible.