On Wed, 22 May 2002 18:56:49 EDT, Andrew Dorsett <zerocool@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 ;)