Breakfast Sandwiches: individually wrapped fresh, English muffin or bagel with egg, cheese and your choice of bacon or sausage
Gluten Free Bagels
Fresh Fruit Platter: a beautiful display of sliced fresh fruit to include sweet golden pineapple, ripe melon, colorful berries, seasonal fruit and seedless grape clusters
Assorted Soft Drinks: classic coke, diet coke, sprite, ginger ale
Fresh Squeezed Orange Juice
Coffee and Tea: freshly brewed fair trade locally roasted coffee, decaffeinated coffee and a selection of green, black and herbal teas served with cream, sugar, sweeteners and lemon Chilled Spring Water: refreshing cool ice water with lemon wheels
Cybersecurity career paths are more diverse than ever, yet many students struggle to gain the experience employers expect for entry-level roles. In this welcome address, Stephanie Travis explores one often overlooked pathway into the cybersecurity workforce: military service. Drawing on her experience as a U.S. Air Force cyber operations veteran, Maryland Air National Guard squadron commander, and former cyber workforce development leader at Virginia Tech, she will discuss the challenges facing today’s students and how Active Duty, National Guard, and Reserve opportunities can provide valuable training, experience, education benefits, and a strong foundation for a successful cyber career.
Skills-Based Hiring on the Digital Front Lines How the DoW CIO is balancing academic pathways, apprenticeships, and hands-on capability to build a faster, more efficient cyber workforce
In academia, the GPA is a vital metric of a student's discipline, theoretical mastery, and intellectual endurance. But on the cyber battlefield, the ultimate metric is operational readiness. This creates a critical tension: how do we bridge the gap between a student who excels on paper and a practitioner who can actively defend a network under live fire?
The Department of War (DoW) heavily values the foundational rigor of higher education, continually investing in traditional pipelines like the Cyber Scholarship Program (CSP). However, to outpace modern adversaries, we are expanding our aperture. Through our integrated Skills-Based Hiring (SBH) initiative and registered apprenticeship programs, the DoW CIO is shifting how we assess incoming talent. We are not moving away from academic excellence; rather, we are augmenting it with a strict, practical mandate: "Show us what you can do."
The DoW does not dictate academic curricula, but educators must be aware of how the national security apparatus is evolving its evaluation of talent. This presentation provides a transparent look at the DoW’s multi-tiered hiring ecosystem, exploring how we balance academic achievement with hands-on, skills-based assessments. By understanding these diverse pathways, educators can better advise their high-performing students on how to translate their academic success into immediate, mission-ready capability.
