Arthur Carter | Radford University

So in kind of a related question, then it would be interesting, I think, to try and understand how your academic background, the different things that you've done, how does that combination shape the way that you teach cybersecurity and security management today? How does that all fit together?

Well, I certainly with with engineering and the reason I got into engineering was because I like working on cars.

So I wound up as a mechanical engineer because in high school I worked in a body shop and then I worked in an auto mechanic shop.

And and I still to this day enjoy working on cars.

So it's kind of a side hobby that I did some.

But I realized that that wasn't how I wanted to earn a living.

Certainly by the time I was 17 or 18, it's like, well, this is enjoyable.

I like it, but I don't want to spend the next 40 or 50 years doing it.

So that's why I decided to go on to mechanical engineering.

So that interest in hands-on working has always been something that I like.

And so when I look at what we're teaching, I know that these students, especially in the early part of their career, are going to be very integrated into kind of hands-on side of whatever their field is.

And then as you go along, you will move into more of a supervisory role and ultimately likely a management type role.

That's just the likely career path.

And so I've done all of those things.

And I try to make sure that in teaching is we prepare them for those early jobs, but also prepare them for the expectations of what's going to be necessary to succeed in the jobs that are coming in the three to five, maybe 10 year time frame.

I think those are important things to make sure you prepare your students for.

Yeah, very good.

And for our audience, many of whom are new to this field, they're still kind of, you know, evaluating whether cybersecurity or information assurance management is the kind of thing that they want to do.

So for those people, for those students who may not be familiar with the differences, maybe you could explain the difference between a hands-on technical cybersecurity role and a cybersecurity management role.

How would the day look different for those two roles?

So a lot of folks start with the hands-on type job.

They might work for a security operations center called a SOC.

And so they actually go into, and it's not quite like the movies where there's this big room with all these screens around it and everybody's sitting there trying to battle the bad guys.

It's not really quite like that.

But it typically is an area that's set aside where The employees will be sitting at a computer and then they will get it.