Achievements

Involvements

WiCyS

In 2019, I was granted a scholarship to attend the 6th annual WiCyS conference in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The Keynote Speakers included Michele Schochet from Facebook, Wendy Nather from Cisco, Dr. Lorrie Cranor from Carnegie Mellon University, Dr. Dawn Beyer from Lockheed Martin, and Patricia Denno from Fidelity Investments.

The entire conference was inspiring and enlightening; the best part about it, in my opinion, was the opportunity to interact freely with women already in the field and to be able to network and connect with these women. There was also a CTF in which I partipated and overall, had a load of fun.

STEM on the ROAD

In early 2019, I participated in a STEM on the ROAD expo as a representative of Purdue Northwest's College of Technology, traveling to area high schools to demonstrate some of the possibilities presented by the College of Technology. Our goal is to get teens interested in STEM-related subjects and promote PNW STEM-based curriculum.

As part of my exhibition, I presented a custom-created Wi-Fi Cannon which was part of my Senior Capstone Project, created to extend wireless connectivity between devices; as well as a Raspberry Pi created to be a RetroPi gaming system which the students could freely play and interact with.

The Diana Initiative

The Diana Initiative is a non-profit alliance promoting and celebrating diversity and women in InfoSec. In August of 2018, I volunteered to assist with a two day conference alongside DefCon26 in Caesar's Palace for women to network, collaborate, and learn from other women working in IT. The Diana Initiative has partnered with LockPick Extreme to host lock re-pinning workshops during the Initiative.

The Initiative was exceedingly successful, and was popular enough to have to turn away over 900 people over the 2 day run due to space limitations.

GenCyber

In June 2018, I assisted with the GenCyber camp which was held at Purdue University Northwest. GenCyber's mission is to grow the number of students studying cybersecurity in the United States. During the course of the week, over two sessions, high school students learned the basics of algorithmic coding using Sparki Robots, an Arduino-based robot. The Sparki Robots come complete with a number of sensors including IR, ultrasonic, light, and color and are controlled via code written in C++.

The students also learned the basics of safe online behavior and how to determine if sites and emails were legitimate or phishing attempts. The students also had the opportunity to see firsthand some of the tools used in computer forensics and got to search out steganographic secrets and files hidden in a hard drive image.