By: Dr. Ian McAndrew, FRAeS
The weekend before last, the 26th - 28th April, we held our spring residency here at Capitol Technology University. It is the first of three this year and traditionally our largest one with more than 60 delegates attending. On the Saturday, we had the Lead for Academic Engagement of the National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education (NICE) at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Dr. Davina Pruitt-Mentle deliver an excellent lunchtime lecture to more than 100 people - that included visitors, returning students and local dignitaries. We are proud at Cap Tech to have such a distinguished professional dedicate time to support our work, STEM and outreach. Thank you very much to Dr. Pruitt-Mentle.
There are two streams of doctoral students in attendance for on-campus residency at Capitol, PhD in Decision Science students and DSc in Cybersecurity students. First-time attenders had an opportunity to develop their dissertation proposals and were supported with academics and industry experts in this process. We aim to balance their proposals, as many need an honest and experienced guide to fully prepare for the scope of research required. With our experts’ support, the students leave with a structured plan, topic and problem.
Second-year students worked to progress their dissertation and make sure they were on track to complete their final year, where students defend their doctorate work. At this residency, there were six more successful defenses, bringing our total for the year to almost 30 new doctors, our largest graduating class yet.
Capitol currently has 195 students enrolled at the doc level, but has recently unveiled eight brand new doctoral programs, bringing our total program offerings up to ten. Past research topics of some of Capitol’s doctoral students include: Organizational dynamics, the history of password usage in the cyber world, virtualization host utilization using virtual machines compared to a honeypot, and using analytics to improve disaster relief.