W - Writing
I earned my writing credit through the completion of my writing intensive course CYSE425W: Cyber Strategy and Policy.
Importance
I believe that a writing intensive course is critical to preparing students for future careers. In nearly every profession, people will be required to write up reports in one way or another. This can range from accident reports to quarterly reports or even peer reviews. In the case of cybersecurity, this proves especially valuable as there are numerous critical reports that I will have to create, such as threat analysis reports, reports on specific attacks and how we can learn from them, or system reports showing their flaws. Beyond that, the class's focus on different cybersecurity strategies and policies provides us with a great opportunity to learn and practice our writing based on things that impact how we will do our jobs, making it an excellent experience to include in the LeADERS program and the cybersecurity bachelor's program.
Context
CYSE 425W: Cyber Strategy and Policy is a writing-intensive cybersecurity course aimed at improving students' cyber writing skills while also teaching them a deeper knowledge of the political, societal, ethical, and global impacts of cybersecurity strategies and policies. This is carried out through objectives such as describing the goal and structure of a national security strategy and comparing it with cybersecurity strategy, comparing and interpreting cybersecurity policy issues and making recommendations on policy choices, debating ethical issues that arise with cybersecurity policies, and more. A bulk of our writing came from a unique system in which we were presented a list of cybersecurity strategies and policies, given a prompt, and told to pick a strategy or policy from the list and apply it to that prompt. Examples of this can be found in my work samples.
Development
While the most obvious development I could take from a writing intensive course is being able to create stronger reports in my future career, I feel that this course contributed to my professional development much more than just that. With the course's unique structure, I was able to educate myself on numerous strategies and policies that are critical to the current national and global politics of cybersecurity. I feel that it improved my research skills and gave me a deeper understanding of policies and strategies that will affect everything I do in my day-to-day operations in my career. More than that, as I addressed in one of my policy analyses, examining these strategies has changed my view on them from a purely statistical sense to considering how they impact those on networks with these strategies and policies implemented. I think this will prove extremely beneficial in my career.