Khoury News
Studying Information Assurance from Orlando
Students can earn Northeastern degrees from campuses in Boston, Seattle, Charlotte and Silicon Valley. They can also choose to bypass enrolling at a campus and take classes online. That’s what […]
Students can earn Northeastern degrees from campuses in Boston, Seattle, Charlotte and Silicon Valley. They can also choose to bypass enrolling at a campus and take classes online. That’s what Mary Logvin, who lives in Orlando, chose to do when she registered in the Information Assurance graduate program.
“I was lucky enough to work for a company that would reimburse us for furthering our technical education from an ABET accredited program,” Mary, a software engineering manager at Lockheed Martin, says. “I looked at options and thought that Northeastern best met my needs. Being online was a plus. That’s why I chose it.”
The program took Mary about two and a half years to complete while continuing to work full-time, and she graduated in 2014 with an MSIA. And despite having an entirely digital course load, Mary says she and her peers were able to build close relationships using Facebook groups, Google Docs and other online communication tools. Her group was a diverse one, including other working professionals like herself as well as full-time students. Because of the breadth of specialties covered within that group, they were also able to swap information on applying cyber security in fields ranging from defense contracting to banking and finance domains.
“We were all over the United States,” Mary, whose field of expertise is defense contracting, says. “We learned from each other how we would apply different techniques and the education we were getting. I was most interested in network security and penetration testing, while others were more interested in PCI and HIPAA.”
Since completing her program, Mary says she’s applied the skills learned in the classes she took to daily tasks. One of Lockheed Martin’s primary clients is the Department of Defense, which has mandated that the company employ cyber security methods in its work. This includes ensuring that all information technology projects conform to a Risk Management Framework by a set date, with the transition set to occur over the next couple of years.
“My education on network security and writing software with secure methods has been useful", Mary says. She also uses what she learned to inform her interviews with potential hires: “I know what to look for as far as education and certification.”
The professors who taught her classes were a high point of the program, Mary says. While she wasn’t enthusiastic about a cyber law class, she says the instructor made it an enjoyable and interesting course. Other classes that stood out are ones on digital forensics and systems security. The professors and classes made an impression on Mary, though she never sat in a traditional classroom or attended in-person office hours with an instructor.
“I’ve been to Boston,” she says. “I’d like to come up again and see some of the professors I had.” But she’ll put that trip off until the winter months are a distant memory, and summer warmth returns to Boston.