Topics discussed in this Episode include:

• Jennifer’s origin story focusing on how the study of Spanish in college helped lead her into law school for intellectual property and how that led to trademark infringements and cybersecurity.
• A deeper dive into the development of her interests in volunteering even to learning to knit during COVID and making scarfs for service people.
• Turning to teaching, a discussion of the importance of education especially to underserved populations such as attend CUNY (The City University of New York). A focus is on building a sense of purpose in this field to which these students respond. That inspires them and even though they have challenging lives, they show up.
• The field of cybersecurity is important here as it has high relevance to them and to New York city in which they live.
• The role of taking roles in the classroom in mock companies, which is part of her teaching, allows them to see themselves in those roles and as experts, certainly much beyond what the average person knows about cybersecurity.
• That translates into an feeling of excellence in themselves such as when she has them make cybersecurity posters and put them up in their neighborhoods to help warn people particularly during cybersecurity month in October. Given the size of the class, there are typically examples right there of student who have been victims of cybersecurity attacks.
• Finally, she discusses how cybersecurity should be a collaborative field without egos and, importantly, with room for such students. She uses the works “art of protecting” and they resonate, even to the point of protecting themselves not only from cyber-attacks but in general, and that helps to produce a real-world, experiential, motivation that drives their performance.

Resources discussed in this episode:

• https://www.infragard.org/
• https://www.iq4.com/
• https://hunter.cuny.edu/
• https://guttman.cuny.edu/