 Think Tech Hawaii, civil engagement lives here. Welcome back to the Cyber Underground, I'm Dave the Cyber Guy, I'm your host, I'm an instructor at Cappy Eleni Community College for the University of Hawaii System and today we're going to be talking about internships and how to start your cyber career, part three. With me today, one of my fellow instructors, Dale Nakasone, and he handles our internship programs, welcome Dale. Thank you David. Good to have you buddy. Thank you. Thank you for inviting me. Well, we both teach for the University of Hawaii, Cappy Eleni Community College. We have a program for cyber security and as everyone knows when you go out there to get your first job, it's what certifications do you have, what education do you have, and what have you done. What's your experience? Well, let's talk about that. I've been at Cappy Eleni Community College since 2002. I think I've taught almost every IT course that we have. You're our utility player. Yes, I taught a whole bunch of them. In addition to that, prior to joining the IT department, I was in the non-credit side of the house, so we used to coordinate training classes, computer-based training classes, being software. Your typical Microsoft office deal as well as CAD, those type of courses, and one time we ran courses for senior citizens. And then I joined the IT department as an instructor or lecturer, and then taught a whole bunch of stuff. And right now, I'm focusing on databases, that's my passion, database. So, we used to do database administration, but it seems like with the cloud hosting of a lot of data these days, the administration is mostly like a control panel, and you don't do a lot of administrative tasks anymore. So tell us about the direction you're headed with your database classes now. When I first started teaching databases, oh, many years ago. Careful now. We're going way back. Yeah. Sorry, my age. Initially, database courses are all about design, placing the data in the appropriate hookup, in the appropriate fields and those kind of things, and just properly designing them to capture the information so that you could get things out. Putting the relationships together. Yes. Exactly right. And that's changed, and it went the way of administration. So now, the better tools start coming around, Oracle, SQL server, the open source stuff, MySQL. Those products, what it enabled us to do was to add a level of administration and security, as well as a little bit more sophistication in what we can do with the data. But like everything else, like in security, like in computers, like in smart phone technology. Here comes automation. Everything changed. So lately, it's been around for a couple of years now, the buzzword is data analytics. And what we've done at Kapi Atlantic Community College is now we're going to shift that focus away from administration and take it more towards the way of analytics. So how to visualize the data, how to manipulate it, and how to ask questions that we might not ask? Yeah. So data first, placing it in a format where we can ask the questions, and then comes the part about, okay, now that we've got the data, what it is telling us, you know, what is it saying to us, what is the story. It can be surprising. Yes. Absolutely. And you see data analytics in a whole bunch of things. The movie Money Ball was a movie about data analytics and baseball. That's a great example. Exactly. Opened in athletics. And what they did was they revolutionized how data can change the way we look at things. And in that particular movie with athletics, it talked about, it spoke about what we can use the analytics for in recruiting the right kind of certain type of player, placing them in the lineup. Because they fill that spot. Yes, exactly. We need base hits at this time, or he's a good RBI guy, or he's a good utility player. Right? Exactly. Now, we use that a lot in cybersecurity. Exactly. You apply a little bit of artificial intelligence with some fuzzy logic on top of that. And the data can tell you all kinds of things, especially when there's an intruder in, trying to hide in the millions of records in your logs, there's one or two that kind of correlate and you fish that out, and oh, look at this, and that brings to light some other stuff. So that's incredibly useful that we're going down this path. Now in addition to that, you handle our internships. Yes. Okay, so internships, I guess it's a broad term, and a lot of people don't really focus on how to define it, or what people actually do during that, or what's the methodology we employ. But tell us a little bit about how many students you got, how much work it is, how we put the students in, what's that for, when does it come in their educational path, and how do you do it? The internship course came about because every year we invite members from the community, from the private sector, people who have the potential of hiring our students. And several years ago, we said, why don't we have our students participate with these companies and these organizations prior to their graduation? So it works both ways. Our students get a look at what's real, and the employers get a chance to look at our students as potential employees. So we started this internship program. Usually the students take the internship program in their last semester with our program. And so they're ready to graduate. They have taken and completed the bulk of the courses that we require of them. So they have the skills to meet a potential employer's need, we feel. Each semester I have between 15 and 20 students, and we try to place them in different organizations. We call them sponsors. Our students have to have at least a minimum of 120 hours as part of that. That's with direct supervision, most of the time. And what we ask of the potential employer's sponsors is that they give us a midway evaluation and a final evaluation of what our students did for them, what kind of worker with them. And I'm happy to report that for the most part, the values for our students have come back as excellent people, people that get along with coworkers, they know the work, they can do the work, and they come to work. It's tremendously important to put them in that setting. Yes. And I think most people know the age-old, the version of nerds that we are. We don't seem to be the most communicative. We don't seem to be people, you know, people responsive. We like to hide in the corner and do our own thing. But it's tremendously important now to get those people in front of other people so they can start interacting. I think it's so easy when kids are growing up these days to stay on their computer, to get on their phone, to have these online relationships, and they're bold and brash online. Yes. But when they come up and they start talking to people, they lose their English skills, and they can't really communicate too well. So this is a tremendous help to put them in front of somebody who is not going to make them as nervous as someone in an interview. Yes. Right? They get that personality test. For most of our students, you know, this is not their absolute first job. But for many of them, it is their first employment situation in information technology. So it's a different look for them in seeing what is real, you know, all the stuff that we're teaching them, all the stuff that, you know, we're trying to get into their minds, you know. All of a sudden, there's a light that comes on that says, hey, that's why I took that course. That's the aha moment. Yes. And it used to be, I guess, you know, when we started our careers, we used to say that every IT student would, you get thrown in the pit. Yes. That little windowless room. Yes. You have to do PC repair and then take stuff to a desk and crawl in the ceiling and run cables. But nowadays, they could put you right on the phone, give you a headset, and you're helping customers. Yes. Absolutely. That takes a lot of communication skills. I remember, oh, way back when I was doing Help Desk, you have to imagine their desktop sometimes because sometimes you can't see the desktop. So you have to kind of walk yourself through by closing your eyes. And that takes a lot of concentration and some experience. And I think this is a tremendous asset when you go to an interview. You can say, I've actually done that. Yes. In a rural setting. Right. Yes. Not just in the classroom. And I made a paycheck. Yes. So most of our internships are paid or? I would say about half and half. Some are unpaid. But of late of the last couple of semesters, I think almost all of them were paid. Yeah. And not great high-wage type of positions, many of them just at minimum wage. But you're an intern. Yes. I mean, this is the sweat you got to put in to get your career. And of course, there were several unpaid ones that you did like or better opportunities. I remember a few of those, some of our star performers went to the state and did unpaid. But it was like being the president's assistant. Yes. And when you're in the White House, you're doing stuff, you actually get to see that environment. And then they know you. And they can offer you work. Maybe not the White House. Not the White House. We have our little version of the Hawaii's White House and the state government. Yes. They're fair about it. They put the job up online. You have to apply like everyone else. But when you're in the interview, everyone knows you. Yes. Because you were there. You were the intern. Everyone knows you have the potential. So it's really about who you know out here. Yeah. Because it never hurts to have those things on your resume. And you know, I say that, you know, I just say that, you know, right now for many of our students, their resumes are rather light. Yeah. But once they do that internship and once they complete that internship, all of a sudden it's a big chunk. You know, a big chunk goes at the top. What they've done, what they've accomplished, you know, what kind of skills they realize that the kind of skills that we've talked about, we talk about with them the skills, they actually have the skills now because they've practiced them. And some of our students, I think, and correct me if I'm wrong, some of them keep working for those employers. Yes. All the way through school. Yes. Because it's a good part-time job. Yes. And they're going off to UH West. Yes. Or Manoa. And they still need a part-time job. Yeah. They just stay with that employer. We have several former students now that got employment. And that's what they're doing. They're not continuing to the four-year program. They just went. They just went. They got job offers and they took them and they're employed. There's a lot of potential out here in Hawaii. Yes. I don't think a lot of people know that there's a lot of great jobs out here with the state, with the federal government. Yes. There's just tons of federal government out here. And then we have 77,000 companies according to the labor statistics in the state. And many of them are small and medium businesses. And IT people heavily need it. Yes. And not just for an IT job. Yes. We've had internships, I'm sure, where the job isn't actually IT, but it's got a lot of IT related things in it. It has to be IT related. Absolutely. It has to be IT related. And as we tell our students, they need to be able to wear a lot of different hats when they go to these different agencies or for their first employment. Especially with a small company. Yes. You've got to be kind of versatile. Many of those small companies, they could go in support roles. But in the support roles, they need to edit a website. They need to go ahead and troubleshoot computers and printers. And point of sale. Yes. Point of sale. Those kind of things. They need to be able to do that. They need to troubleshoot network problems, connectivity problems. And I happen to say that those are the things that we teach. Those are the things of security. Not just intruders and hackers coming in, but general policies that every employee, every person in the company should follow to better protect their data. Better protect their network. I agree. We're going to take a little break and we're going to come back and talk a little bit more about that. And then go into more detail about where our interns actually end up. What their success rate is. Good. Let's take a break. We'll be right back, everybody. Until then, stay safe. I'm Jay Feidel, ThinkTech. ThinkTech loves energy. I'm the host of Mina, Marco and me, which is Mina Marita, former chair of the PUC, former legislator, and Energy Dynamics, a consulting organization in energy. Marco Mangelsdorf is the CEO of Provision Solar in Hilo. Every two weeks, we talk about energy. Everything about energy. Come around and watch us. We're on at noon on Mondays every two weeks on ThinkTech. Aloha. Hello, everyone. I'm DeSoto Brown, the co-host of Human Humane Architecture, which is seen on ThinkTech, Hawaii every other Tuesday at 4 p.m. And with the show's host, Martin Desbang, we discuss architecture here in the Hawaiian Islands and how it not only affects the way we live, but other aspects of our life, not only here in Hawaii, but internationally as well. So join us for Human Humane Architecture every other Tuesday at 4 p.m. on ThinkTech, Hawaii. Welcome back to the Cyber Underground. I'm Dave, the Cyber Guy, and here with me talking about internships at the University of Hawaii Capulani Community College is Dale Nakasone, a professor there with me. And he teaches the database line and also you're the internship, do they call it the internship leader, supervisor or? Coordinator. Okay. We were talking about is security is part of everybody's job. So internships, not only do you have to wear a lot of hats and IT, however, including that, you have to do a lot of security. And you end up as the person who knows a lot of security, you get into that company and you have to be the trainer. Yes. Right? Because security is not just that guy. It's a hive mentality, right? So hopefully we're training our people enough in basic security techniques to be able to pass that on to their new employers or wherever they're working. And I try to promote in my classes entrepreneurship. Yes. You don't have to just go work for a company. You can go out there and start your own company. We've had two of our former interns, former graduates go out there and just start their own company. Great. And they're doing well now. Not exactly IT related, but they have all that great cyber and IT knowledge when they start their company so they don't do things like set up a wireless router and forget to change the admin password. Yes. Which is a bad thing. Yes, yes, yes. So let's talk about the internships. We have a little bit of an issue here on the islands. Our jobs out here in the islands don't tend to pay what the mainland pays. Yeah. So we have something called brain drain. We, and that's nothing new to Hawaii. We've had that for many years. And for my students, I actually encourage them to take a look. And of course many of them want to stay home. And I want many of them to stay home. But I also, we constantly talk about possible employment centers. There's booming industries, tech and booming industries that need technology workers all over the country. Right. It's not just Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle. No. It's not just those. Yeah. Austin, Austin, Texas. Huge tech center. University of Texas. Yeah. Austin Community College. It's a college town, but Dell is there. Yes. Yeah. And places like Atlanta, you know, Raleigh, North Carolina. Big banking center. There you go. So there's a lot out there. If the student is willing to take a look and if they're willing to, you know, want to do that. And, you know, what it does, those types of opportunities, what it does is you're, it allows the student to learn different things that may not be offered here as much as, you know. That's a great point. So you go to Silicon Valley for a while. You go out to Manhattan for a little while. There's a tech center in Silicon Valley. Right. You work for Microsoft. You work for Seattle and Amazon. And you get all that experience. Wouldn't it be wonderful if someday those people came back here to the islands with all that great experience and knowledge. Absolutely. And expand our tech industry. Yes. I've always thought it's funny that our west coast is so tech heavy, but we're the farthest west state in the country. And we're right on the front lines of all this nastiness with China and North Korea. Even Russia has an east coast that looks at Alaska. So we're facing all the enemies of the United States with potential enemies. Right? And yet we're not this huge tech center. Yes. Right? We're a DOD epicenter, though. Yes. We have the NSA, FBI, CIA. Everybody's out here. Any three-letter acronym you can think about. And some of our students actually go there. Yes. Right? And have been employed there. Right. Michelle Monsalungan. She does the show every once in a while. She's going to graduate here pretty soon. She's the one that did the state ETS internship for no money. And we're so proud of her. She was a single mom. Yes. Doing that as, you know, incredible. Right? And like you, you know, many of us love our students. Oh, yeah. I mean, we actually, you know, we are so, you know, we're so passionate about their success. You know, so when they, when they do get the, you know, get that success like Nathaniel, like Michelle, you know, it, you know, all of us celebrate, you know, we're just jumping up because we're so happy. And, you know, it's not just the big names like the NSA and those kind of things. Our students are working for small and large companies and agencies, government, state and federal governments out there. And for every single one is celebrating. Every single one. Including the entrepreneurs. Yes. Ryan Boardman. Yes. Good company. Good for him. Yes. Again, not IT. But he's got all the IT skills so he's not going to fall into the traps. I would bet he's going to be very successful. Oh, come on. He's a real go-getter. Yes. Yeah. We have, we have students that come to us and play with me here for a little while. We're going to play a little game because I know you know this because you teach some freshman courses and I taught a lot of freshman courses. When a student comes into IT, so let's pretend this student is watching now saying, hey, what's this all about? Sometimes you don't know what you want. You just know information technology is cool. But when we got into the game it was we could go work for a company and we were the guy. Right? We had to do everything. You can't do that anymore with a lot of companies, right? There's the web guy and the cloud guy and the networking guy and the programming guy and there's the help desk guy or gal. And now you have to get in and the great thing about community college is inexpensive and then go take databases. Yes. And programming. Yes. And cyber and networking and a range of things. And we always tell the students go with what you're good at. Yeah. What did you go on to? What makes you happy? What thrills you? Yes. Because that's what you're going to be passionate about. For us it was teaching. Yeah. We didn't know it at first. Well, all of us did not start in teaching. Right. Right. And then we went, wow, this teaching is kind of cool. I kind of like this. Absolutely. And now we just have this passion for it. I wish I'd known before. I probably would have had my PhD by now. But it's still, it's a wonderful experience in community college. Yes. And I joke with everybody that I had a great time in community college. Yeah. That first two years of college, the six years of my life. Yeah. And we have a wonderful student body that doesn't have this motivation to get through that two years because it's $40,000 a year. Yeah. Right. And, you know, of course, there are bigger academic names than Kapyalani Community College. Sure. But, you know, the, the, I would, I would, you know, I'm proud to say that our students get better or more attention, you know, as a student than any other university in the country. And it's not just classes. They go. We have internships. We have outside clubs. Yes. That they can do. We have the Hawaii Advanced Technology Society, HATS, has a chapter on almost all the campuses here in Hawaii. And, and we actually put them in a position to, if they do want to, what they call, articulate or transfer to a four-year college, they're adequately prepared. Yes. To enter that university and compete at that level or, like you said, yeah, go get a job. Yeah. And, you know, most of our offices are within a few feet of walking distance where the students are learning. You know, and so if they want to come and talk to us, you know, we're right there. Yeah. And we regularly try to circle around and try and see if our students are, you know, in need of any kind of assistance or just want to talk. Sorry. So, you know, we have a one-on-one personal relationship with all of our students. Yeah. If they want it. And that helps in the internship. It helps in the academic and professional careers. Now, we do something every once in a while, and I love this about the internship you've been doing. A student can, if he arranges with you, or he arranges with you beforehand, they can actually perform the work hours in a summer. Yes. And take the actual course, it's 293, ITS 293. Yes. They can take that in the fall. Yes. So, that's three units of I've already done the work. Yeah. But I'm just going to write a couple of notes. Yeah. Yeah. But I'm just going to write a couple of reports. Yeah. Go to some seminars. Yeah. And much less work. Yeah. And I already have three students that have completed the course, and of course it hasn't even started yet. That's phenomenal. That's great. Pretty much done it. Yeah. That's great. And the three unit class they have to take with you, that's, you know, that's three units of their full-time that they don't have to put much effort into. Yeah, they're pretty much done. So, they can focus a lot on their terminal courses. That's pretty much ready to post that grade. As soon as the semester starts. Right. Yeah, you got to wait until the semester starts. We should also mention we're getting some new opportunities. Yes. So, we always let our students go off to the University of Hawaii, West O'ahu, for their bachelors of applied science and IT, and the BAS also in Information Security Assurance, or ISA, with Matt Chapin out there on the west side. But now, we have UH Maui College. Yes. That has a four-year degree. And it's online. So, our students can complete the internship with you. They can do the HATS Club if they want. They can get the great experience. Plus, we have an advanced professional certificate, third-year college courses. So, this is junior level on campus. Yes. They can do all that, then transfer out to Maui for the last two or three semesters. And the Maui, the Maui component is online. All online, so they go out there. Yeah. Most of our students complain, yeah, they have to drive across the island. For you male lenders out there, that's not going to make a whole lot of sense. It's only about 26 miles to the west side of the island. But with the amount of traffic on this island, unfortunately, that can be, what, up to an hour and a half if you get stuck, yeah. You know, I go through it every day. Yeah. And it can be bad. Especially for on a bus. Yeah, that's terrible right. So great opportunity for some students that would like to do a business degree with IT Focus. Maui College has got one now. So we're always, we're building more opportunities. I think on the west coast now, several colleges do a program that give our students reduced tuition. It's not exactly local rates, but it's not out of state rates either. It's about 60% of the bill. You know, there's, I was just brought to my attention that, you know, Washington State University has this WUI program where they accept community college transfers, you know. So the students get their ASD degree that can come in for in-state tuition plus 50%. Yeah, that's a great deal. Yeah. And you get the mainland experience. Yeah, I mean. A lot of local people out there. And they're always at a campus is working with to provide those pathways to our students so they can achieve their goals. So let's sum it up. We're passionate about our students. We love them. Tremendous amounts of opportunity. Yes. It's inexpensive. Yes. And we give them a lot of attention and coach them through. Yeah, we have great instructors that can talk. Of course. Yeah. And we're so good looking. Thanks for being with us today. On the cyber underground. I just got back from Black Hat and DEF CON. So in the next couple of weeks, we're going to start talking about all the horrors that I saw in the presentations of Black Hat and DEF CON and DEF CON's famous sky talks. And by the way, it's terrible. Everything's broken as Andrew, the network guy would say. And he's going to be in here at the end of this month too, we're going to have some great discussions. Don't miss it. Until then, aloha.