June 14, 2023

This paid piece is sponsored by Dakota State University. 

Dakota State University – Applied Research Lab has created a summer cyber program for individuals looking to gain new technology skills or to refresh and renew existing knowledge in cyber.

The DSU-ARL Cyber Bootcamp program is the result of the cyber-research initiative announced in 2022. Events were intended to begin in the summer of 2024, but research engineers with the DSU Applied Research Lab, or ARL, were able to create pilot programs for this year. They are offering free, weeklong camps in nine subject areas this summer, said Joel Wohnoutka, executive director of the ARL.

The program is intended for South Dakota college students who are pursuing “cyber-adjacent” degrees, such as computer science, computer engineering or electrical engineering. The DSU-ARL Cyber Bootcamp will provide these students with a basic foundation in cyber topics to expand their knowledge base. In turn, this will establish workforce opportunities for them through government contract work, possibly at the ARL locations in Madison and Sioux Falls, Wohnoutka added.

For the pilot year, DSU is expanding the program offerings to early career professionals in these cyber-adjacent arenas, explained Alex Wollman, one of the project coordinators and a research engineer III with ARL.

“This program could benefit individuals in many fields so would also be great for industry professionals,” said Jarod Keene, co-lead for the project and research engineer II with ARL. These courses, for example, could help business app developers who want to know how to make secure applications or businesses engineers working with Internet of Things devices, he said. Recent high school graduates also could register.

“We want full classrooms for this summer’s boot camp sessions,” Keene said.

The on-campus, in-person courses include a combination of lectures and hands-on labs on networking, software security, offensive cybersecurity, defensive cybersecurity, reverse engineering, cryptology and operating environments.

The next five-day course starts June 26 and focuses on defensive cybersecurity. Subsequent courses run for five days throughout July.

The course curriculum was developed based on DSU courses and summer camps. “We enjoyed rebuilding course content for a group of people who might not be cyber-focused,” Keene said. The curriculum is interesting and nuanced but with enough of a hands-on component so “people will get excited about the content.”

The camps will be taught by adjunct instructors at DSU who have experience with classroom teaching and hands-on labs. “It will feel like a true DSU experience,” Wollman said.

Keene said: “We’re excited to see how the pilot programs will run. We hope the feedback will be as positive as we think.”

Registrations are accepted up to a week before each camp. DSU also is providing laptops for the camps, and housing options are available if campers do not live near Madison. For information, go to the boot camp website: bootcamps.madren.org.