About GCSP
My Challenge
Me & My Challenge
The Grand Challenges Scholars Program (GCSP) at University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) is inspired by the set of grand challenges for the next generation identified by the National Academy of Engineers (NAE). The program trains students to be ready to help solve these 14 challenges by focusing on five different areas: research, interdisciplinarity, entrepreneurship, global perspectives, and service learning. This program, and others like it around the world, hope to give students a broader skill set than what is traditionally taught in an engineering curriculum, and to bring in students from all majors to contribute to these challenges. This is all done to meet the magnitude of these challenges, which are too large to solve using a traditional approach alone.
For more information on the GCSP program or the NAE challenges, see:
The challenge that I elected to focus on is that of securing cyberspace. We live in a time where almost everything is dependent upon a computer system to run properly; everything from business, to health, to social interaction has computer assistance, and often occurs online. At the same time, however, these systems are vulnerable; major hacks show up all the time in news headlines. For our current society to remain functional and make progress on any of the other challenges, we must make this cyber realm that we are so dependent upon safe and secure. This will require technical solutions, actually being able to prevent or defend against attacks, as well as social and legal solutions necessary to implement these new technologies.
For more information, see:
http://www.engineeringchallenges.org/challenges/cyberspace.aspx
I applied to the GCSP because it represented something on such a large scale. I wanted the chance to be a part of something larger than myself and my individual studies, as well as a way to connect my disparate studies together; GCSP provided an opportunity to do both. Once in the program I selected the challenge I did for two different reasons. Part of it was because it aligned well with my prior experience, studying programming and formal methods. The other part was that it fit well with how I tended to see the world; with every new innovation I saw a potential for it to do good, and also a potential for it to be abused or undone. The challenge of securing cyberspace focused on the need to be cautious and to keep one eye out for what might go wrong; this focus on security and safeguards, coupled with the domain being relevant to my experience, made it a natural choice for me.
About Me
I am a senior at University of Maryland, Baltimore County, with a mathematics major and a computer science minor. After graduation I will be starting work as a software engineer, with plans to go back to school later in pursuit of a master's degree. Though my primary career goals are still somewhat in flux, I know that my primary fields of interest are computational mathematics and software security; the latter of the two is what ties into the grand challenges the most. For more information, keep reading below.
