Certification or College degrees?

Thu May 23 01:43:50 UTC 2002

On Wed, 22 May 2002 18:56:49 EDT, Andrew Dorsett <zerocool at netpath.net>  said:

> never be required to build one.  This would be the perfect curriculum.  I know Valdis is from VT, so I hope he's listening.  Why

I just work at VT - my BS is in mathematics, with a physics minor,
Clarkson University '84.  (OK, to be *really* technical, it's a math
degree because there wasn't a separate CS program/degree till '86, but
as a result I got zinged with a lot more calculus and related than the
average CS major)

> my Comp Engineering program doesn't touch on anything related at all to
> networking, and never even mentions the idea of security.  So why not
> create a focused area for this?

Stop by and talk to me or Randy Marchany about security - he taught a
grad-level class on it this semester.  The biggest problem we're facing in
getting a full-fledged academic program going is that most of the people who
have a clue are the CIRT team, and we're all network operations and sysadmin
types - Randy's the only one of us who does much teaching and lecturing.

We get hit with a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem.  We can't scare up
enough warm bodies(*) to teach more than one or two grad-level courses a
year in security.  Meanwhile, the number of grad students who have enough
free course slots to *take* more than one or two classes is limited,
since all of the current "focused areas" have prerequisite lists of
classes.  And creating a new "focused area" is a challenge - it sort of
presupposes having 2 or 3 PhD-level professors to teach the classes, and
given that VT is currently trying to trim it's budget by $25M, it's
unclear who'd pay for THAT...

/Valdis

(*) For some reason, the number of people who will teach a grad-level
course for free is quite limited - *I* certainly won't do it for free ;)

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