Gretchen Bliss, director of cybersecurity programs at UCCS, is proud that her department recently was ranked tops in the nation in the 2024 Centers of Academic Excellence-Cyber Defense Community Outreach Competition. The award recognizes UCCS’s outstanding, year-round engagement with the community to provide career pathways for graduates, and signifies that outreach is a keystone of the UCCS cybersecurity program.
“We did over 100 activities touching over 12,000 people in our community,” Bliss says. “That’s something we’re very excited about, because UCCS is seen at that national level as being a leader.”
In recognition of UCCS’s regional and national leadership, Bliss persuaded the National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education (NICE) to bring its annual conference to Colorado. Bliss is co-chair of the conference, which takes place June 1–3 at the Denver Marriott Tech Center.
“We did a pre-event on March 7 where we brought industry, government, community partners, students, faculty and K–12 teachers together,” Bliss says. “We had about 90 folks come and talk about the challenges to cybersecurity in our community. The NICE Executive Director Rodney Petersen was super impressed and flabbergasted at how diverse the group was.”
After the pre-event, UCCS hosted a Cyber First Friday, where Petersen’s “socks were completely blown off when 350 people showed up,” she says.
Cyber First Fridays have been presented for the past six years, bringing together students, industry and government partners for company-sponsored presentations, pitches, mock interviews and networking that help students get comfortable with industry personnel and learn about potential internship and job opportunities.
Industry partnerships are a critical focus, both to inform cybersecurity programming and to provide hands-on opportunities for students.
“When we look at what industry certifications we give our students, we make sure the industry tells us which ones are most important,” Bliss says. “Cybersecurity changes year to year, and we change what we do around that.”
Internships are valuable for students to understand the true needs of the industry. UCCS was a founding member of the Space Information Sharing and Analysis Center (Space ISAC), which awards fellowships to undergraduate and graduate students, and Bliss serves on the board of directors.
“We also work very closely with the companies on the (UCCS College of Engineering and Applied Science) Engineering Leadership Council to come up with creative ways of getting students internships,” she says.
The University also partners with Data Mine of the Rockies, an initiative modeled after the pioneering Purdue University Data Mine, in which students engage in real-world, data-driven projects. Students from UCCS and other Colorado schools team up for nine months, working virtually to solve actual problems posed by companies. While not specifically an internship, it’s a project that is impressive on a student’s resume, Bliss says.
“They could say, ‘I worked for a year on a Lockheed Martin project looking for anomalies and large language models,’” she says. “Most people that want to hire them will know what that means.”
Thanks to sponsorship by the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade and the Catalyst Campus, UCCS fielded five teams of 10–12 students last year, and Bliss hopes to recruit 10–15 teams for the next session.
The summer camps UCCS hosts for middle schoolers comprise another form of outreach. The camps have been presented for the past four years. This year, weeklong introductory camps will be held beginning June 2 and 9.
“We do hands-on activities, and at the end of the week, we have an escape room where they apply all their knowledge to save the world from an awful weapon that’s going to destroy our cybersecurity,” Bliss says.
New this year is an advanced camp beginning July 21, where students who have completed the introductory camp can dig deeper.
Since 2018, the state has been providing annual support to UCCS to help build the cybersecurity industry in Colorado.
UCCS has deployed its $2.8 million authorized annually by the Colorado Legislature to create cyber events, hire faculty and staff, develop cybersecurity courses across five colleges within the university, help five other institutions of higher education expand their cyber programming, and engage with companies, government, military and community organizations. An increasingly tight state budget now has forced the Legislature to cut that funding in half.
“We’re going to revamp and re-evaluate the best way ahead with those funds,” Bliss says, but the University will continue to prioritize student scholarships, which have averaged about $560,000 a year.
Chancellor Jennifer Sobanet “has emphasized making sure the scholarships stay consistent,” Bliss says. “We’re going to work on that as a baseline assumption.”
