During my beginning searches for hopeful internship prospects, I kept my mind open to every possibility as I was still largely unsure of the typical day to day tasking of a cybersecurity specialist. While I’ve had small portions of insight as to the possible paths the career field can take, I was ultimately unsure of what I was in for. I was surprised to discover LightGrid LLC and their need for a small intern team to work under the CTO, Alan Sekelsky, but was unsure of how my strengths would play into an environment opposite of the stereotypical internship I expected. Little did I know that the smaller team, and closeness of the company, would result in a knowledge rich environment that encouraged learning and teamwork, two traits that would lead me to the confident position I hold now.
LightGrid LLC is a Small Business Administration (SBA) certified HUBZone small business that works through contracts with government agencies in an effort to solve unique and specific problems with telecommunications, data management, network architecture, and other cyber security services such as live coverage and updated policy implementation. As a HUBZone small business, the teams operate within a region often overlooked by larger corporations in tasks such as policy development and cybersecurity strategies involving data management and accessibility. Working alongside a small business compared to a larger outfit has proven invaluable due to the closeness between team members throughout the company. I quickly discovered how useful it was to be able to ask questions without having to jump through the right hoops.
The internship team consisted of a three-person connected unit including Alan, CTO of LightGrid, Allison, a fellow senior from ODU, and myself. Mentoring under someone as experienced as Alan has turned out to be one of the luckiest events of my life, as every task, question, idea, and theory I had was able to be discussed, debated, or simply worked on as a team. Alan is a waterfall of information about the field of framework management, policy development, and cybersecurity in general. His wealth of knowledge has guided the intern team through weeks of tasks that has set us up for success in an efficient and enjoyable manner.
From the very beginning, Alan tasked us with a simple but interesting task of scraping the internet for current events happening within the world of cybersecurity. This task while initially seeming disconnected, established the mindset of those who have worked in this industry for much longer than we have. In searching for relevant events, we read through articles, reports, blogs, or seminars all containing different information about recently discovered vulnerabilities, cyber-attacks, threats of attack, data about attacks, and policies written in response to attacks. All of these were then picked apart to find information that relates to LightGrid and small business cybersecurity practice, a task that turned finding interesting articles, into dissecting articles to find the small details that we could learn and grow from. Our current events task as we took to calling it, is something that we have covered at the start of our meetings for the entirety of my time with LightGrid. While it may seem redundant at times, I have found myself ingrained with a new skillset for uncovering information that while may not seem important to some, could mean the world to a small business practice hoping to develop policies.