Throughout this internship, I learned a lot which is outlined in the following reflections.

Team Reflection:

In your team reflections, tell us about your client (a quick synopsis of the business and leadership)? 

Omnicruit is a professional international nurse recruiting firm dedicated to placing highly qualified foreign and domestic registered nurses and other healthcare professionals into positions within United States healthcare facilities. The company serves as a bridge between international nursing talent and U.S. healthcare facilities, addressing the critical shortage of medical personnel in the United States.

The President is Tim Armstrong, accompanied by his team, which includes:

• Shirletta: Operations Manager
• Maullasab: VP, Talent Acquisition
• Patricia: Senior Recruiting Coordinator

Discuss the client engagement with your team. How often did you communicate?  Were there barriers that you were able to resolve or not able to resolve?

We communicated with our client once a week. We had a Teams meeting with him and the team a week before the final presentation. We were always available through email if they had any questions.

There were no barriers.

 

In your team reflection, what went right? What went wrong?  If you could do the project over, what would you do differently?

• Right: Effective communication, finished the project on time
• Wrong: first client ceased communication, left with concerns and anxiety about next steps

In terms of what we could control, no we wouldn’t do anything differently.

Describe the most motivating or exciting aspects of the internship.

• CISA talk from David Price
• Design Thinking with Dr.Baaki
• Talks with Greg Tomchick

Describe the most challenging aspects of the internship.

-Having to regroup after our first client flaked and perform under a time crunch

List your recommendations for future interns in this internship. What preparations do interns need before starting the internship?

• Strengthen your knowledge of the NIST framework
• Professionalism

List your recommended changes to the course.  What would you like to see added or removed or remain the same?

• Already having an extra small business on standby
• Monthly checkups with the small businesses to ensure they are still interested

Individual Reflection:

Throughout this internship and this class I have learned quite a bit about how to bridge cyber theory and the knowledge I have gained from my classes to the real world. I’ve learned how to apply it in a manner consistent with tasks that you would perform in the workplace. I’m really grateful that I had this unique opportunity to partake in this program where it is class and an internship rolled all into one. I feel that it really led to my development in the best way. At the beginning I was quite nervous that I wouldn’t be able to do work to a proper standard for my company as I had never really done anything like this before. However, after the development of the program and mentorship from Greg Tomchick and our Teachers assistant Lee Acheampong it became much more clear how we as a team should work together to construct our final briefing for our client, Omnicruit.

After I got accepted to the program I didn’t really know what to expect. The description didn’t allow me to fully understand and grasp what I was getting myself into or what I would be doing. I assumed I would be assigned a company and then a mentor that would occasionally be there to help me but I would mostly be by myself. However, I’m very glad that the program was constructed the way it was instead, as I was able to develop my skills throughout a course, then given guidance to build and give a brief to a client.

The program began with introductions to the people we would be working with throughout the course, Professor Duvall, Lee Acheampong, Greg Tomchick, and John Constanzo. After we met them and understood how each person would specifically help us and what their role was we were briefed on the layout and structure of the class. Then we began 8 weeks of instruction and various class exercises, followed by 8 weeks of working with our client.

We began our sessions with several classes working on Design Thinking with Dr.Baaki. He taught us how to use ,“Yes, and”, to develop your fellow innovators’ thoughts instead of just striking them down. You should say yes and here’s how we can improve that thought. He also taught us the design thinking process which helped us as cyber security majors think about the steps in between actually coming up with a finished product; actually thinking through the whole process instead of just getting straight to work and banging out a product without thinking it all the way through. This was really helpful and crucial to learning how to create a product. It’s just like in elementary school how your teachers go through steps just as an outline, draft, or brainstorm before you do the final product. It allows you to stay organized and think every step through, instead of rushing through and potentially missing something.

However, I do feel that this may have been lost along the way. I feel that with the limited time we had to work on our company’s brief combined with the fact that in Dr.Baaki’s exercises we worked on Johnathan Cares we may have overlooked incorporating the important pieces of Dr.Baaki’s sessions into our work. I feel that maybe a quick pop-in from Dr.Baaki or a reminder of the key points of the Design Process from Professor Duvall would have helped us a bit more. I would honestly like to see a work class period where you work on applying the design thinking process to your company specifically.

We then had a talk with a lady from career development services on professionalism. I don’t feel that it helped me exponentially but I am glad that she came as I feel that some students in the class have not had the same opportunities as me to work on their professional skills in experiences external to class.

Afterwards, we worked with Greg Tomchick on the Valor CyberSecurity Top 10 checklist. He did a great job really applying his sessions to how we would be working with our client. He sent us out onto the streets to experience rejection firsthand by having us run through the checklists with local businesses. This taught me a really valuable lesson that I just realized as I was writing this reflection. I went to numerous businesses, cold-knocking them and the majority of them although I was offering a free, beneficial service turned me down as they didn’t know me yet. One of the businesses I did, District Taco even yelled at me even though I ended up getting him to answer the questions. After all this, I was able to easily do a check for a Fortune 1000 company where they told me much more details than they probably should and much more than any small business I did. They did this because I knew the AI director there. What I realized is how crucial networking is, to all the people that didn’t know me they were extremely skeptical. However, the guy that already knew me didn’t ask any questions. He was onboard from the start, because we already had a connection, he was comfortable with me and he knew I wasn’t going to waste his time. Greg taught me a lot through his seminars and through my personal conversations with him. I am going to be shadowing him at his office in Downtown Norfolk in a couple of weeks and I hope to learn more from him there.

Working with Omnicruit was a great experience, they were a much larger company than our original company, Jonathan Cares. I felt like that really led to how much I developed from the program. We met with their President Tim Armstrong in person, as well as 2 other members of their management team on Microsoft Teams. This introduced me to the frustration of other people not being accountable in the workplace, as Tim forgot about our original meeting date so we had to reschedule which put us further behind schedule than we already were. Overall, it was really great working with them as they are pretty developed for a small business and are more on the startup level. Their needs are advanced as they are a fully cloud based company that has experienced 2 attacks and was recently experiencing a variety of phishing attacks. I outlined a lot of technical recommendations for them and felt like the SWOT analysis gave me skills that would be applicable to the workplace. I also drafted up some policy ideas for them.

This internship will positively affect how I view getting a job and make me feel less uncertain about what I would actually do in the workplace. It has made me consider going into compliance or risk management more heavily as I really enjoyed the project. I recommend giving a little more time for the non class sessions portion of the course as I feel that there is a lot to do in that time frame, especially with finals. I would recommend removing the class periods for going out on the streets during Greg Tomchick’s sessions, because regardless we have to work outside of the class period during this internship, so I would just rather have a longer time to do so.