Four of the majors offered by ODU that I am going to explain how they relate to cybersecurity will be the following: Criminal Justice, Political Science, Electrical Engineering, and Computer Science.
Criminal justice majors are likely to head towards the career path of law enforcement. As technology advances, crime will evolve, and laws will change to reflect this. Whether you are a police officer or an attorney, you should understand this field as well. Crime now exists in places it would not have existed five decades ago. Human trafficking is one of the largest crimes of the modern world and vulnerable people are lured in and sold online to the highest bidding pedophile or rapist.
When you consider individuals that are responsible for mass shootings, they usually “live” online and create a digital footprint that can alert authorities of their intentions, whether it is their buying habits, associates, or online comments they are creating. Being able to understand cybersecurity will afford the ability to prevent these atrocities as often as possible.
Following criminal justice, political science is another major relates to cybersecurity. As mentioned earlier, laws need to change to reflect this ever-growing cyber world. To quote the late great Ben Parker, “with great power, comes great responsibility”. If technology is our great power, cybersecurity must be our great responsibility. Today’s world is full of drones, autonomous vehicles, and digital currency; all those devices are hackable. If you are on the career path of being a politician then your responsibility is to be able to articulate the need for sensible laws to help govern this new technology.
Electrical engineers are some of the creators of hackable devices. Cybersecurity does for electrical engineers what a raincoat does for someone in the rain. The Department of Defense is aggressively retiring old military aircraft and they are focusing their budget to reflect this new reliance on unmanned aerial vehicle strategy. While electrical engineers are developing these war vehicles, it is of great importance that they consider the cybersecurity risk that follows it.
Computer science, out of the three majors I previously mentioned, is probably the most relatable to cybersecurity. Like electrical engineering, cybersecurity goes hand in hand with computer science. The computer scientist, while this is a broad major, creates programs that are susceptible to being taken advantage of by hackers. Someone you know has likely become a victim of identity theft simply because they downloaded a free program from a sketchy website or clicked a misleading link from a website.
Every major at ODU reflects our English courses because we are required to understand English to be successful. This same theory can be made about cybersecurity.