Board 396: Supporting Students' Success in the Cybersecurity Field: Accomplishments and Lessons Learned by the ACCESS project
Katerina Goševa-Popstojanova, Daniel Mackin Freeman, Robin A. M. Hensel · 2024
The NSF S-STEM funded project "Attracting and Cultivating Cybersecurity Experts and Scholars through Scholarships" (ACCESS) has a goal to increase the number of high-achieving undergraduate students with demonstrated financial need who complete a degree in the cybersecurity field.This goal contributes towards addressing the huge unmet need for cybersecurity experts.This paper presents the activities and the accomplishments of the ACCESS project thus far.The ACCESS project has successfully awarded scholarships to four cohorts of students consisting of a total of 50 unique students and has achieved its objective to increase the annual enrollment in the B.S. and Area of Emphasis (AoE) in Cybersecurity at West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV.Specifically, the enrollment has more than doubled since the beginning of the project.Over four years, the ACCESS project developed and offered numerous co-curricular activities and student support services and has strengthened its partnerships with many cybersecurity employers from the public and private sectors.Students' feedback about the ACCESS project, which was provided using surveys and focus groups discussions conducted by the external evaluation team, was overwhelmingly positive and highlighted significant benefits to students' academic success and their future professional careers.This paper also presents the lessons learned that were synthesized using the observations made by the project team and evaluation team, and the feedback provided by the students.These lessons learned can be institutionalized at West Virginia University and elsewhere in higher education to aid students' success in their education and future professional careers in the cybersecurity field. in Cybersecurity curriculum was designed to map to the ABET accreditation criteria for Cybersecurity, Centers of Academic Excellence (CAE) Knowledge Units, and the NIST framework.In 2022 the B.S. in Cybersecurity program at West Virginia University was accredited by ABET for a period of six years and it was redesignated by the National Security Agency (NSA) as a National Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense Education (CAE-CD) through the academic year 2027.West Virginia University is also a National Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Research (CAE-R).LCSEE faculty are conducting active research in multiple cybersecurity areas, such as software security, intelligent malware detection, information assurance, hardware security, resilient systems, critical infrastructure security, and use of biometric systems for cybersecurity.