Our Programs
Events
The core of the CVCSA community centers around regularly scheduled events. These fall into three categories: speakers, functions, and CTFs.
Speakers will be scheduled on a semester-by-semester basis with a suggested semester-long theme and significant lead time to allow for responses. The call for presenters would be promoted through CVCSA's social media and its partners. Speakers would not be paid but would receive customary perks and/or swag.
Functions will be geared towards providing students with networking opportunities through in-person social events. They may be organized directly by CVCSA, by individual member clubs, or in partnership with other organizations such as the National Cybersecurity Student Association. These can include but are not limited to:
Conferences/sponsor events (CyberForge )
Job fairs
Mentorship fair
Swag swap
Game event
Junk box swap
lockpick village
Learning Pathways
The amount of information and number of sources available for learning outside of the classroom can be daunting. It is easy for a student to be discouraged or sidetracked, wondering where to start and which sources to trust. A CVCSA could help members navigate this information jungle by creating maps or playlists with effective resources.
These Learning Pathways would be subject-specific, addressing both broad and narrow interests. Sweeping topics such as cyber newbies, policy management, digital forensics, incident response, and penetration testing could exist alongside or encompass more specific interests such as password cracking, intrusion detection, or memory dumps. Each pathway would list a progression of learning materials suggested by faculty and professionals rated by students to be pruned and curated over time.
Mentorship
One request that students consistently made was not just for learning resources but active learning assistance. Someone to turn to with questions and help make the large amounts of information they need to consume more digestible. Our team advocates a mentorship program a cornerstone of the CVCSA.
The CVCSA should develop outreach to alumni and professionals to find volunteers who can provide a consistent, reliable point of contact for both technical and career questions as well as assistance with learning pathways. They would primarily make themselves available online through a CVCSA Discord or similar service. Attending events and member club meetings would also be encouraged.
Finding a mentor might take a number of forms:
Mentors might be paired with specific clubs in order to consistently attend meetings and be a frequent point of face-to-face contact.
They might be paired with specific learning pathways or groups of pathways, making subject matter specialists available to interested parties.
Students might choose the best fit for themselves from a pool of mentors, with care taken not to overload mentor volunteers.
Cyberforge
CyberForge is the main Conference and CTF event hosted annually. Each year, this event will be hosted at one of the CVCSA member colleges and universities to help connect the members of each all the schools together. This is a 2-day event where the first day consists of presentations from cybersecurity professionals and the second day is the capture the flag competition. For more information about this event, please visit the event website at the link below: