SUMTER, S.C. — Morris College wants to talk cybersecurity. If you don’t know what it is or what jobs it includes, that’s okay. The Sumter HBCU has majors and minors to teach students all about it. Today, the school is celebrating Cybersecurity Day by inviting local high school students to campus to learn about future career paths.
“It’s a lot of opportunities,” Lakewood High School freshman Xay Fordham shares. “And it’s a lot of fun.”
Those are two takeaways from the event, where high school students like Fordham and his friend Eric Sweat got to visit the HBCU to complete exercises, play e-sports and dance.
“Some kids don’t know what is out here,” Fordham shares about Morris College. “But if they get out, they’ll see what’s out here.”
“It’s giving them life experience, see what it's like for some of the job opportunities that they can have and approach,” Michael Selle, an instructor at Crestwood High School, adds.
This is the event’s goal, Cybersecurity Professor Orenthio Goodwin explains.
“Events like this certainly do drive the interest in what cybersecurity is all about,” Goodwin says. “We’re in a technologically-driven society. Everything is driven by technology. So you know, whether it's our televisions, our watches, our phones, drones, you know, we are open to, we are susceptible to attacks and scamming and things of that nature. So…we won't be able to ever stop it. But we can make people aware that it exists.”
An effort that cybersecurity majors Brooklyn Damico and Kayana Littles appreciate.
“People don’t even know that they can major in it, so yeah it is cool that we have this day because people don’t really know about cybersecurity,” Damico tells me. “Especially when I tell them that’s my major.”
Although Goodwin says when it comes to the demand for employees to work within the cybersecurity field, “There's a huge demand. It is a huge need.”
As Chairman of the Division of Natural Sciences and Mathematics Radman Ali says, “we see cybersecurity involves all of our aspects of life.”
According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, employment of information security analysts is expected to grow 32% over the next 10 years. There are nearly 17,000 projected openings for that role each year.
As Morris College works to meet that demand, Ali explains the school is working to establish a two-year associate’s degree in cybersecurity, and is continually growing its e-sports program.
Teaching the rising generations about cybersecurity is important not only to meet that employment demand, Goodwin believes, but also because “students are the mainstay for our technology today.”
“Everyone has a phone, so they’re communicating through the cyber universe. So that’s why a lot of the attraction that we have with our students, we are trying to educate them so that they when they come into the world more so in the outside than where they are now, they are able to understand cybersecurity enough to show others,” Goodwin shares.
“We are trying to educate the public and educate the students also so they can go out there and be participants in the process to protect us, to protect themselves, their families and all of the nation as well,” Ali continues.