October 7 – ESPAÑOLA – “Fi wyvi xs hvmro csyv szepxmri.”
The nonsensical message was written on the whiteboard in Professor Michael Gideon’s classroom in the High Technology Building at Northern New Mexico College.
In his advanced topics in cybersecurity class, Gideon instructed the students to literally decipher the message. It’s a manual simulation, using a cipher thousands of years old, of a task that computers can perform almost instantly.
In addition to the decoded text “Make sure you drink your Ovaltine,” the exercise sends a clear message about cybersecurity practices, said Jesse Menendez, a student in his fourth year of a degree in information engineering technology.
“Encryption is very important because anyone can hack into a system or gain access to your stuff,” he says.
Northern New Mexico College is working to expand its cybersecurity offerings for students like Menendez. In collaboration with Los Alamos National Laboratory and the National Nuclear Security Administration, the school will establish a new Center for Information Technology and Cybersecurity.
Although plans for the center are still in the early stages, the center will help the college offer bachelor’s and associate degrees, as well as industry certificates with a “strong emphasis” on cybersecurity, said Ashis Nandy, chairman of Northern’s Department of Engineering and Technology. .
“The idea is to indoctrinate them into a mindset of security from A to Z. … We don’t know what we don’t know until someone finds a vulnerability that we can exploit. So the idea is to show them the need,” Gideon said.
The reasoning behind the new center is simple: “This is a skill set we need in the laboratory,” said Frances Chadwick, staff director at LANL.
Thus, Northern New Mexico College will serve as the newest protégé in the laboratory’s Mentor-Protégé Program, an initiative sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy designed to spur economic development near national laboratories across the country .
In the center’s first year, Northern will receive $376,675 from the National Nuclear Security Administration to fill a faculty director position, fund outreach activities and update software and hardware. Courses taught through the center are expected to begin in fall 2025.
“This is the first minority higher education institution to participate as a protégé in the U.S. Department of Energy program,” U.S. Senator Ben Ray Luján, co-chair of the Senate National Labs Caucus, said in a press release announcing the partnership was announced. .
He added, “I am pleased to see the Laboratory and NNSA working with Northern New Mexico College to train students for good-paying jobs.”
While the center will add to the pool of qualified, local candidates who could fill one of the lab’s more than 1,000 computer science positions, Chadwick said the skills students learn will not be unique to LANL.
“It’s a really good skill set for any industry; every business in New Mexico relies heavily on IT,” she said.
This won’t be the first partnership program between Northern and the lab, which often works with higher education institutions on workforce development. Northern has been a “great partner” in providing qualified workers to the laboratory, Chadwick said, especially through a radiation control technician program created with LANL’s worker needs in mind.
There’s also a benefit to the university, Nandy says: “These are really good paying jobs, even at entry level, so I think this should hopefully attract more students.”
The work at LANL and cybersecurity keeps students busy.
Andrew Garcia, another fourth-year information engineering technology student, started working in the lab right out of high school.
The program at Northern was a perfect fit for him, Garcia said: He didn’t want to move too far from his hometown of Pojoaque, and he wanted to keep his job at LANL while continuing through college.
Mendendez also earns his degree between shifts in the lab.
Both students agreed that they can immediately implement what they learn, even if they have to continue learning to keep their skills sharp in an ever-evolving field.
“We’re always going to have to learn something new, but it would be good to learn what we know now. … I feel like the more you learn in IT, the more you’ll get a job somewhere,” Menendez said . .
