Hannah Bass
Proposal CPD 494
3/1/2023

Entrepreneurship has proven to show that those who are most successful are those who solve real-world problems that are faced by the community. Innovations hold very little power if they serve no purpose to the market. Would someone make an object that accomplishes nothing? Would someone create an idea that does nothing but exist? The answer to each of these questions is inherently no. My major is cybersecurity, a discipline whose goal is to safeguard the nation’s networks from malicious attacks. All things considered, my group’s innovation/idea needs to be directly related to my major. Creating an idea for cybersecurity will show how impactful my learning has been at Old Dominion University and epitomize what it means to give back to the community.

The idea that my group and I are presenting is the use of virtual reality to train students in cybersecurity within their specialty of choice. Virtual reality is seemingly becoming popular in video gaming to make the individual feel like they are physically present. This is accomplished by placing a screen in the form of a mask and connecting form-fitting controls on the hands. Additionally, the use of virtual reality can be seen in training for pilots. Pilots can utilize a simulator to practice their skills especially when they are new and inexperienced. Why? Because it is provided as a resource. Using the same technologies as an exhaustive, risk-free way to learn would be advantageous without taking away the feeling of being present.

Cybersecurity is also a field that includes numerous specialties that can be hard to take an initiative to focus on during one’s undergraduate career. Some of these specialties I speak of include and are not limited to digital forensics, ethical hacking, social engineering, software development, vulnerability management, auditing, policy writing, network engineering, analysis, and project management. This ultimately can make it challenging to be skilled and ready for the job market. Often at job fairs, the recruiters will ask the student what it is they are interested in, and it can be hard to form an answer after only being on the cusp of finishing a bachelor’s degree. Everyone might think that internships and labs are already in place to allow a student to explore skillsets/specialties but there are a lot of impracticalities behind this notion. Internships might provide thorough training, but the student is dedicated to that specialty without having any tangible knowledge of what other specialties are like. Additionally, lab environments might provide the student with the precise technical skills needed to get by, but often these lab environments do not give a true feeling of what an everyday workday would be like on a certain path. There is no time to go through the process of finding different internships over and over until interest is sparked. Virtual reality can save meaningful time and give students the same professionalism that an internship would.

  A lot of students also do not have the means to find an internship as well as others. Some students must maintain their current full-time jobs that have nothing to do with cybersecurity to afford to live. Adding an internship to their full-time job is often unachievable considering these are students also enrolled in courses. Another considerable issue is the lack of transportation among students. There are plenty of local internships available in the Hampton Roads area, but an individual cannot get to a said internship without transportation. Using virtual reality technologies for training will be extremely accommodating for those who face such challenges. These problems have all been brought up by our peers and are also challenges we have faced ourselves. Every individual has a unique environment/experience that withholds them from opportunities, and they deserve comprehensive training.

Conducive to creating a virtual reality program that truly embodies work environments and everyday work tasks, there is going to have to be a lot of collaboration among various entities. This holds itself to be a huge barrier within this idea for many reasons. Workplaces, whether that be private industry or government, will have to agree to participate in this idea because it will be based on their work and their help will be needed to get the details right. However, in cybersecurity, most of the information that one comes across regardless of one’s specialty is highly sensitive information. Individuals working for this company or agency often must undergo an extensive security screening process to even get started on the job. This is to ensure that the person being hired is trustworthy enough to come into contact with safeguarded information. The idea is to give students training quickly and effectively. If students must be obliged to obtain a security clearance to be enrolled in this virtual reality training, it can be a major drawback. Security clearance processes take months and different organizations, agencies, and businesses require different levels of thoroughness that can possibly take even longer. So, the content within the virtual reality program would have to be hypothetical or outdated content. The organizations and agencies would have to either come up with scenarios that have never happened, or they would have to share scenarios that happened a long time ago. Granted these old scenarios cannot be connected to what is actively happening in the present for apparent reasons. Would these entities truly be willing to give their time in such a manner?

Another barrier would be the accessibility of the virtual training. Students might have disabilities that would preclude them from participating. Disabilities that come to mind are vision impairment, hearing impairment, epilepsy, vertigo, chronic headaches, and possibly more. The virtual reality device is so close to the eyes and could be unwise for people with these disabilities to participate if the standards are the same as the virtual realities in video games. We would have to accommodate disabilities to the best of our ability. An additional accessibility barrier is the affordability of the service. Virtual reality is expensive to produce and the equipment that facilitates the experience is also very expensive. A college student might have a hard time affording such a thing and we would have to take that into consideration. This could possibly be solved by creating buildings that have shared access to virtual reality equipment. These buildings could be placed on campuses emulating libraries. Perhaps this could also be an idea that has the potential to apply for a grant because it is educational. It might be in the government’s best interest to invest in something like this to produce highly practiced cybersecurity professionals. The need for this is overwhelming and ever-growing.

Since this idea focuses on training, there are ways to test the viability of this idea. Firstly, there should be a way within the virtual reality program to tell if the student is achieving what they should be achieving on their path. This could be measured by a point-based system, such as experience points in a video game. As students progress through the training, they would be given experience points as they would in a video game to level up. More advanced training would require a higher level of experience points, and this gives the students a higher sense of success and satisfaction upon completion. Another measure of success could be surveys at the end of the training. The survey will have to ask for basic information such as what path the student chose and how well they performed, but it will be more centered around what the student felt about the experience. With this survey, we would want to know if they found it helpful and if there was anything we could do to improve upon the service. Finally, a huge indicator would be to look at job turnover rates at the conclusion of the training. Were the students actually able to obtain a job with their degree and the virtual reality training? Did their experiences within the virtual reality training prepare them enough to tackle their new job with the utmost effectiveness? All of these instances will help us gauge the success of the entrepreneurial venture.

Hopefully, virtual reality training for cybersecurity students will be the next big way to produce the next generation of brilliant cybersecurity professionals. The idea certainly solves an array of problems that have been voiced by students time and time again. As students, there are certain challenges that we have to face. Our idea may tackle some of them. Since virtual reality already exists, the remaining barriers are possible to overcome, and success is at the forefront.