 Good afternoon. My name is Ray Tsuchiyama. I am today's host for another great, great viewing program on business in Hawaii, where we really highlight how business and society, government, academia all interact. And in today's show, we have a theme of developing young professionals. And we are going to really delve into how one organization in Hawaii and throughout the U.S. has a program to create a pathway for future careers, especially in IT and all kinds of cybersecurity and in areas of computer science. And that company is called Booz Allen Hamilton. And today we have on my left, my extreme left is Sean Fox, is an associate with Booz Allen Hamilton and the coach of this interesting internship program that we'll be describing more later in the show. And to his right, we have Jocelyn Louie, who's a student at Hawaii Pacific University. And to my left, Carrie Noe, a student at the University of Hawaii at Ma Noa. And so the first question is, Sean, what is Booz Allen Hamilton and how is it kind of related, connected to this program, internship program? Sure. Booz Allen Hamilton is a management consulting company. I've been in business for over 100 years. So in fact, depending on who you ask, we actually, Edwin Booz, the founder of the company coined the term management consulting. Oh, great. Don't look in Wikipedia, it says something else. I heard the story, I don't know. He was a pioneer in that very early field of management consulting. Exactly. And we have actually 25,000 employees around the world do a lot of business supporting our Department of Defense and government contract, government customers. We came to Hawaii, our first project here in Hawaii was actually in the 60s. Right. We opened up our office here on Bishop Street in 1996. And today we have about 400 people in the Pacific Rim, 300 of whom are based here in Honolulu. Terrific. And tell me about your own work. What areas do you work in at the company? That's always a good question. I do a lot of small projects, depending on where the need to fill is. Plus, as we'll talk about the summer games to university outreach and a bunch of other outreach programs that Booz Allen here in Honolulu and as a firm we'd like to focus on. Terrific. We'll go back to that. And next we have Josh and Louie. And why don't you tell us about your background, where you're from, and how you came to be today. Go ahead. I love to. I was born and raised on the west side of the island. So, born and raised in Kapolei. I graduated from there in 2014. And then I later went to Hawaii Pacific University for my BS in computer science. And now I'm studying to get my MBA. So I've always been drawn to puzzle solving. And that's kind of been something that drove me towards computer science. And I actually, my latest puzzle, I just learned how to pick locks. So that's, I know. That's a physical kind of delving into a mystery, right, which is the lock itself. But when you say about puzzles, is it puzzles of crossword puzzles or puzzles, putting together puzzles? What kind of puzzles are they? Well, for me, I personally enjoy being able to put things together. So it's very much the physical puzzles. I do also enjoy Sudoku. Oh, that's been fun for me. Which is about numbers here. Right. And so I think I was in elementary school when I started getting into that. Only the easy ones, of course, but started to work my way up. What a brain. That's terrific. Brain puzzles and using exercises. Now, Kari Noe. So you're from Hawaii, but I heard that you're from a neighborhood. Go ahead. Oh, yeah. I was born and raised in Kauai. I graduated from Kauai High School. I came to UH Manoa to study. I just graduated with two degrees, one in computer science and the other in animation. And this fall, I'm going to start my graduate degree where I have an RA ship with the laboratory for advanced visualization applications. We call it lava. That's terrific. And which computer language do you like best? That's a hard question. Like, because most computer, most coding languages, you use them depending on what you want to do. So I do like C-Sharp because I tend to code using Unity and I code using to make games or virtual reality projects. So that's typically what I'm making. That's a new one on me. In my world, C++ or C or Java were the heavy areas. Definitely had to learn that too. That's right. It's kind of funny because I had a friend who didn't know much about computer science, but later he became a whiz that when presented with C++, the person thought that C would be easier than C++ because C++ seemed to be later in the variations. But luckily for him, he dived into C and realized it was like machine language. But it got easier from there. Yeah, so everything was easy to have to see. But we're just a story for you that only C-S students could understand. So back to Sean. What was the trigger for really developing internship program? And how did it all begin? Well, in actuality, the summer games program is what we call Booz Allen Hamilton is in our 11th year. We came the first program first time we had a team and it was in Honolulu was in three was three years ago. So really about 11 years ago, Booz Allen realized that we wanted to find great college students, put them through an internship program and prep them for coming to workforce. So how did you find them? Do you communicate with the faculty and said, let me know if you have some bright people coming through or people who kind of can fit into our culture? How did that? How does it work? Well, the good news is in a prior job before I joined Booz Allen, I was tightly connected with the Department of Engineering at University of Hawaii. So when we decided to do this, I reached out to former contacts. Having said that, we've expanded to Shidler, we've expanded the College of Computer Science, even some of the other natural other science language, other science programs. But we've basically through hard work of reaching out to different people, we know alums reaching out to former professors have built a network of professors that when we when it's time for us to start recruiting for the summer games and at HPU as well, I forget one of the people that I met at some event, found out about it and reached out to you, HPU. So it was really through grassroots of, you know, alumni and people today were still in contact with alumni that were very involved in the in the university. So how many have gone through the program in locally in Hawaii with you with the organization? So first year, we had eight students last year, we had 12 and this year, we have 10. So total of 30 students have gone through our program. And really the objective of the summer games is, you know, to, you know, we've for this year, especially we're focusing on, you know, AR VR development or software development, data science or cyber, because we also know that it's impossible to hire every enough people to fill those three roles within our clients place. So we're growing these what we call purple unicorns. The interview process is actually pretty hard in Hawaii, we're a little bit different. As a program I started three years ago is we actually have them come and do like a five minute pitch on something they're passionate about like you would see on Shark Tank. Yeah, yeah, right, right. So we had about this year, about 50 students go through. So you're judging their communication skills, presentation skills and knowledge about about the world. Exactly. And so the 40 students we interviewed about 20 went through that program. The rest of it applied through just our normal online. And we do a night of interviewing where they spend like the first 45 minutes interviewing with four people. And the other half are doing a workshop on taking taking our DNC what they would come up with and then we switch. Then at the end of the night, the staff gets together and we kind of do a one through 20 and pick the top, you know, five or so and this year actually we got our top five, we did two nights one for cyber one for our AR VR team. And we got top five for both this year. So switching to Jocelyn. How was your experience related to what you just said? Was it was a challenging or was it something that based on your, you know, background, it was easy? I wouldn't go so far as to say it was easy, but I really enjoyed the process. I think that participating in the five minute pitch in front of Booz Allen Hamilton staff, that was really helpful. And I think it kind of prepared me for interview night just because Sean was picking people at random basically during that presentation process. Exactly, you do. And so I actually, I used to compete in pageants. And so that really, I think kind of helps get me back into the groove as far as just thinking on your feet, being able to communicate with others and collaborate. I enjoyed the interview process just because a lot of the associates that we had interviewed with, they made us feel at ease. I have no doubt that they saw the thing. Any question that was very challenging or something that made you really think deeply in order to really express what a response to that question? Any any questions like that? I would say for me, probably the hardest question that I had to answer was, why did you pick Booz Allen Hamilton? And honestly, I had a list of reasons for why I wanted to apply. Well, I thought about it for a while, actually. And so I kind of asked them, well, how much time do you have, basically, for this question? And I just wanted to really communicate that company culture, investing in your employees, and then also the ability to show what I can bring to the table. Those were probably my top three. Terrific. And Terry, you went through the introductory period. Any thoughts on that? On using your background to really prepare yourself or kind of express yourself? Right. So I was really excited because even in the when we're coming up with different pitches to do for the first round and then getting to the interview night, a lot of the questions were centered around virtual reality. And that's what I am passionate about and specialize in. So I had a lot of fun because they constantly were asking me, Oh, what's your idea about this virtual reality project? And I'm like, Okay, here's 10 of them. You want to hear more about kind of thing? So I had a lot of fun in that in which I was lucky that it kind of went into what I was interested in. Terrific. So it kind of fortunately was up your alley. Well, so we're going to take a break now and come back and we're going to go into more details about their current project and what they want to do in the future. This is Ray Tsu Chiama for Think Tech Hawaii. For Think Tech Hawaii, I appear every other Monday at three, and I have really, really exciting guests on the exciting topic of energy efficiency. Hope to see you there. Are you tired of sleep walking through life? Are you dreaming of a healthier, wealthier, happier you? You're not alone. And that's why thousands of people tune in each week to watch RB Kelly on out of the comfort zone, Tuesdays at 1 p.m. Make a change, get the help you need and stop sucking at life. The army, we're going to go live. Hello, it's 1 p.m. on a Tuesday afternoon. And I'm your host, RB Kelly. Welcome to out of the comfort zone. And the two students are making me feel very old in terms of computer science and how it's really moved into new areas of society, government and business. And the two areas that Sean mentioned are really, really high up in expertise that we really need for the future, which is in cyber security, and also in developing new programs and engineering. Tell me more about those two areas at the Booz Allen Hamilton. Okay, so the, I mean, what we call the purple unicorns, if you will, cyber security, and as it's growing field, and then you just can't find enough experienced people to fill all the roles. And it's not just with Booz Allen, every every company and organization having the same issue. And also, you know, data science, and programming and data science and programming can be kind of very similar. Within Booz Allen, we have a project that we call the data science 5k, which is we're going to train 5000 employees to become data scientists over in in five year time period. We're taking looking for college students and taking our internal student people that want to focus on the cyber realm and giving them the experience and exposure to actually grow the skills or grow our own people to do that, which I think is very unique about Booz Allen and companies today, not a lot of companies invest in growing their people. Booz Allen really believes it. And then the third field that is just we're really keep on saying it's about to explode, but it's getting hotter and hotter is at AR VR. And the reality is, it's such a new field that there aren't, there aren't people that have the experience because there's just happened just at the beginning, right? And actually, as a firm, we have 700 or 375 total interns across America, and about 20 different offices. So far, there are five AR VR teams. So just within such about 25 students that were having focus on the skill set with the goal of hiring them all. And that tells you how we see that industry growing if we feel we're going to need 25 new employees next May. So coming to Jocelyn, so doing your purple unicorn period in this summer program, what did you work on? Or what are you working on? Well, the project that I'm working on, I'm part of the cybersecurity team. So we're helping build up the hive. It's an open source case management tool that allows cyber staff to respond to different incidents. For example, if there's a breach within a company, a data breach, they can enter all of their information. It's good for storing indicators of compromise. And basically, we're trying to help build up the user experience and really kind of just add to their code base to help protect data for small businesses, as well as large businesses. And since the project is open source, that means it's available for everyone to use, right? So exactly paradox. But I'm going to see the source code. But what that means is that the work we're doing now, we're actually making change for all future users, they'll be able to benefit from what we're working on right now. So you're making the code easier or more efficient or that kind of thing? Basically, yeah. So what we're trying to do right now is add in some different statistical analysis tools. We're trying to implement customized templating case reporting, just because you have to do that throughout the life cycle of the case, we're also trying to allow for easier access to audit logs, which is extremely important as well. Well, those are really exciting areas. And we come to you, Carrie. And what are you working on? And does it have any relation to the AR VR area that you're so passionate about? It does. So my team is Digital Solutions. And right now we're working with Bishop Museum to create augmented reality apps so that the Bishop Museum can distribute it and have it so that they can show some of the pieces of their collections and to teach about their collections that they may not be able to with their usual static exhibits that they have now. So basically, it's almost like an adventure game because we're aiming it for a little bit of a younger audience. And you can go around the Bishop Museum and find certain markers. And when you find these markers, you can unlock certain experiences, games and information so that you can learn about whatever the topic is. Well, that is a fantastic app because, you know, there's so much richness behind certain artifacts and treasures that they have at the Bishop Museum. But that kind of, like you say, it creates a pathway to know more about the background of certain historical, you know, things that they are objects and so forth that they have in display at the Bishop Museum. That is fantastic, kind of merging the most recent AR VR tools and with the history of Hawaii, with the Kingdom. That's terrific. So back to you, Sean, when you look at the background, the history of the project and going forward, you know, going forward in the future, any changes or you want to take this as it is in the future or any best practices come to mind in terms of developing young professionals? That's that's a really good question. And I always say if you're not learning, you're dying. So yeah, I think every year and if you look at how this is our third year and my third year of coaching teams, and I look at how I was a coach the first year versus this year has changed. And even the hiring process, although we do the pitch nights and all that to bring people in, it's we've learned a lot about the process of how to, you know, nurture the students when they come in and really grow the skill set that'll make them better professionals. And I think that's Booz Allen ways, you know, when we say when you hire for Booz, some for Booz Allen, you don't hire the person you hire the firm, there's a lot of support behind it. And really teaching the people that we target is people that are part of that team mentality that are there to support each other and help each other. So I think if there's anything gotten better at teaching that, but also at even just finding the right, making sure we're finding the right people that fit into that, the, you know, Booz Allen model. Now, of course, in the world today, competition for well trained technology professors is global. It's all over the world right now. And of course, in Hawaii, we have graduates coming out of public schools, K to 12 into universities and so forth. If you were looking at the K to 12 DOE and saying, we would like to see this so that you there are people who are prepared for the future for roles and technology or engineering cyber security, we would like to see more of this in your curriculum in K to 12. What would that be? That's actually we are the title sponsor for first robotics employee. So we are as Booz Allen Hamilton knows. And if you go to the championship, our name is up on the big board the whole time. So actually booze and I don't know how many years we've been doing that recognize that we needed to grow STEM students, if you will. And the program we have invested from Lego robotics all the way through high school with not only financially, but a lot of volunteer time from our staff is first robotics. So the kind of answer your question that was that's one of the things we focused in on this, you know, science, technology, engineering and math. And another bit, I'm sorry, is go ahead is also about first robotics. It's not just about building the great robotics about working in the team, being able to present the well rounded scientist is a big part of that as well. And the second part is where I really would like to see more of because you can have 20% of the tech and math and whatever computer science, 80% to me is the English, the presentation skills, knowledge about the world. What is the world about essentially, and how to present to an audience. And as when I was a Google collaboration teamwork, I mean, I would even put a higher priority on that technical skills. Because if you can't explain a project and get it forward, it just doesn't proceed back to Jocelyn. So if you had a person younger than you coming into the program, anything that you would tell them about what you should have prepared in order to really make a successful contribution to the program? I would say come with an open mind, be ready to learn different languages. For example, the project that I'm working on right now, Hive, I'm working with HTML, JavaScript, there's the AngularJS framework on top of that. And then on the back end, we have Scala. There's also some bootstrap thrown in there. So I'm more familiar with Java, object oriented programming development, right, right, right. Right. And so we're learning, basically, as we go. So it's end to end, more than just one part of it. It is, it really is. And so I would say just come with an open mind, don't be afraid to try new things. And if maybe you don't get it the first day, it's fine. Come back, try again tomorrow and really just be persistent and keep at it. Well, that's fun. There's a heavy dose of technical skills right there. I'm overwhelmed. Carrie, you're you're interested in AR VR. And we were just talking before the show about a short film that you developed. Tell me about that film, Kai and Honua. Oh, yes, Kai and Honua is actually a 2D and a hand drawn animated film that I created, because I did a degree in animation, it was a senior film. And it is about ocean spirit who is alone in the world, the world's covered in water. And Earth Spirit is born and they kind of have to fight over the territory. But they see that being together new things such as different life forms come about. That's fantastic. Again, the application of high technology to, you know, ancient Hawaiian stories and mythology. This is fantastic. And Carrie, in the world of animation, what is your most favorite animated film or short? Oh, this is the hardest question. I really like Princess Mononoke. Oh, wow. It's Japanese. It's a Ghibli studio, right? Yeah. I mean, they make awesome movies, but Princess Mononoke is my particular favorite. And why is it a story? Is it about the characters? Yeah, particularly the story, because a lot of it has to do with nature. And because one of the main conflicts is that they're this human settlement, and they're trying to develop and you can kind of sympathize with their plight, because they're trying to make it for themselves. But at the same time, you see the forced perspective and that they can't find a way to peacefully live with each other. And so it kind of goes over those themes. So I think it's a very beautiful film, because also just the animation is also beautiful. Yeah, and also it's not just a children's story. It's a more story about nature and about human society and the conflict and so forth. So it's a much richer, what you're saying, it's much richer. Plus, you like the animation. But that's a kind of, I would say not a high tech, it's high tech animation, but it has a style all its own. That's very different. But you're right, that animation style is globally really, you know, light. So back to you, Sean, in terms of say they will look to me like that. I want them to talk to me anyway. Well, if you had a question from them, from from your perspective, in there in the middle of their programs, what would that be? That'd be interest. That's a go ahead. That's actually a tough one, right? Because the easy one is what's the hardest thing I've ever asked a tough question. Go ahead. We'll start with Jocelyn. What was what was the biggest one? The biggest thing you've learned? Gosh, I would have to say right now, I just all the different coding languages that we're working with, because like I said before, I'm more object oriented. So scripting web design, never taking the class in it before didn't really have any exposure to it until now. But hey, I've been able to write HTML, get the JavaScript on the back of that to work. I mean, I got excited the first time I was able to make a button work when you click it. Hey, it did something. I know. So that was within the first few days. And honestly, I've enjoyed the challenge. Now you're in the MBA program. Also, what did you see as a linkage between your engineering or CS studies and business? Did you see a really solid linkage or or that the engineering really helped you in areas or the business really gave you a new insight on engineering? What is that? I would have to say that I felt my computer science degree, it gave me the technical knowledge. But then that's only one piece of the puzzle. There's also the business aspect. Well, how would we market this? How can we sell this? Basically, what is the value of this project? And so that's where I think the MBA really comes into play because it's helpful to have the technical knowledge. But I believe you said it before. That's only one piece of the puzzle. If you don't know how to communicate and express, okay, this is the value of it. This is why we should care about this thing. Then it's never going to come to fruition. That's not a new idea. Because when I was a back in the 80s, engineers always wanted to create elegant code. And the product manager wanted to make something that would sell. What would be what would the customers like? What would they really enjoy and help them solve their problems, you know, in healthcare or engineering or in educational fields. So we're coming to the end, but I want to go to you, Carrie, anything that you want to get a question for last one, you've worked on other projects through the lava lab with Dr. Lay and other project teams, but never as a quote unquote real job. So how do you would you compare project management in a corporate setting, if you will, versus the school projects and even on the project teams you've been on because I know a couple of you have been on. So there's a lot more project management. Yeah, yeah. So we do scrum. We do for our project management. So we do sprints and that kind of thing. Usually when you're in school, they don't really teach you that kind of project management skills. So you kind of left with whatever works for your team. So learning project management skills, I think was the biggest like really eye opener for me because I can see how some things that we had trouble in school doing it this way, we never even had that problem working in this project. Would it would have made it easier? Okay, that's a skill set we gave her, I guess. That's terrific. That is a key to work in industry, which is it's all about project management, how to begin it and how to end it. But there's all these things in between working with other people with other goals and deadlines and dotted lines and so forth. And you're absolutely right. That is a key to really working efficiently in a team. So we're at the end of our show. And I want to thank you all for being part of this really informative program on developing young professionals on business in Hawaii. And my name is Ray Tsuchiyama. Thank you very much.