CYBERSECURITY IN INVESTMENT BANKING

Cybersecurity Management major John Clegg ’22, who is from Malvern, Pennsylvania, won second place with his research project, “Cybersecurity in Investment Banking,” in the Graham School of Business’ Annual Research Showcase in 2022. It was this very project that helped Clegg secure his current job as a Network Security Engineer at IT Edge.

It was during Clegg’s Senior Seminar class, in which students were required to write a thesis paper on a project that interested them and relate it to cybersecurity, that he discovered investment banks.

I was able to take financial data from companies and determine if they were under or overallocating.”

His advisor, Dr. Tamara Schwartz, nominated him for the research showcase.

He highly values the education and training he received while at York College.

“All my Cybersecurity classes with Dr. Norrie gave me so much useful information I am still using today in the cybersecurity field,” he says, specifically noting cybersecurity and cybersecurity law.

Clegg feels the best part of being a Cybersecurity major is being one of the first in the major itself, since it was launched during his first year at York College in 2017, and it “started something not done at YCP before.” He also believes his research project was the most influential part of his education.

“The research project allowed me to put what I learned in school into something else I was passionate about,” he says.

Clegg is currently working on publishing his paper and he hopes to bring his career full circle. “My future goals are to make enough money through cybersecurity to live off investing and passive income in my 30s and travel the world,” he said. “I started with investing, then went to cybersecurity and got a job in it, and then will return to investing.”

COVID-19’S IMPACT ON DISABILITY SUPPORT SERVICES

“I realized that there was a lot of potential for hackers to steal money from these banks,” he says.

With the aid of faculty mentors, Dr. Pawan Madhogarhia, Chair of the Department of Accounting, Finance and Business Analytics, and Dr. James Norrie, Professor of Management, Marketing and Entrepreneurship, Clegg was able to narrow the focus of his paper.

“The project is about how much investment banks should invest in cybersecurity, and if they over or underinvest, why?” Clegg explains.

“By taking an already established model called the Gordon-Loeb Model,

Alayna Muñoz ’23, a Supply Chain Operations Management major at York College, researched how COVID-19 affected the disability support services field.

As part of her Presidential Research Fellowship project, Alayna originally planned to study how organizations that support people with intellectual or developmental disabilities (IDD) use inclusivity to determine the direction of their agencies.

When the pandemic struck in early 2020, she no longer could complete her internship. She changed her topic to focus on the impact of the pandemic on the IDD community, and conducted in-depth interviews with service organization leaders in the IDD field to learn about their experiences.

Through the process, Alayna discovered that many leaders in the field faced similar struggles, including a lack of resources, public policy issues, and a staffing crisis, especially for direct support professionals and caregivers.

She used the information gained from her interviews as the foundation for Interpretive Structural Modeling, a research method becoming popular in the supply chain operations management field.

While researching IDD wouldn’t appear to fit with her Supply Chain Operations Management major, Alayna has seen many skills cross over between them.

She chose to attend York College because of its Presidential Research Fellowship. The program provides a full-tuition scholarship for students who then engage in a four-year study of a specific question using a variety of research methods. She was also one of 10 college students recently chosen to receive a scholarship from the North American Rail Shippers (NARS) that is earned by students based on their academic achievement, extracurricular activities, and community service.

For four years, she also has volunteered with Special Olympics and has been involved in other IDD organizations, including Best Buddies International.

“It’s important to really explore your passions,” she says.

York College works with Presidential Research Fellows and the entire Honors Community From Day One to help them form their dreams into a personal mission, which is supported with financial and other assistance. They leave York College with a record of achievement that will gain the attention of employers, graduate schools, or others who provide entry into the next step in the extraordinary lives they imagine for themselves.

Josh Wyrick

Assistant Professor, Civil Engineering

Dr. Josh Wyrick knows how valuable hands-on experience can be.

“If I’m introducing a subject to the students, I want them to see that real-world application,” he says.

Experiential learning is the basis of his teaching philosophy, with a “see it, hear it, do it” approach. After he shows students what a principle looks like “in the real world,” they learn the theories behind the principle before actually doing it.

“You’ve heard about it. You understand why it’s important. Now let’s actually do this,” he explains. “That’s the basic format that I tend to follow.”

Since he specializes in water resources engineering, Dr. Wyrick strives to give students real-world examples of this engineering at work, as a lab is often inadequate in giving students the experience they need.

“Because water resources are such a big thing—I can’t bring a stormwater basin into the classroom, I can’t bring a river into the classroom—my hands-on approach is primarily based on field trips,” he says.

In accordance with this principle, Dr. Wyrick and Dr. Alison Kennicutt recently took a group of 47 junior and senior Civil Engineering students to the National Aquarium in Baltimore, Maryland. Students received a behindthe-scenes tour of the machinery and processes that keep the aquarium going, illustrating the concepts they learned in the classroom in a real-world setting.

“If you want to do water resources engineering, you’re not really playing with that kind of lab equipment,” he explains.

“That has always been my approach— getting them face-to-face with this stuff.”

“Dr. Wyrick has tried to emphasize throughout his courses that there are plenty of avenues/career paths available to Civil Engineers,” says Taslim Hossain ‛23, a dual Civil Engineering and Chemistry major who attended the aquarium field trip. “We were able to witness engineering skills being applied in a setting we were not familiar with, which was truly eye-opening as now we understand that our skills translate to many areas.”

The most important thing Dr. Wyrick wants his students to take away from his classes is an ability to think critically.

“In so many classes, I can give you examples and I can have you do this project, and that will probably never be something that you see again in the real world,” he says. “As a student, you need to come out in my class not being able to memorize how to do this particular solution, but recognize the overall procedure for thinking about this type of problem.”  — S.S.

OPPOSITE, LEFT TO RIGHT: Greta Miller ’22 and Keighla Fetty ’12 at The Yorktowne Hotel during renovations.