Are any schools activity recruiting hacker/cybersecurity types?

College Search & Selection
1

I’m researching opportunities for a ninth grader who is taking honors courses and will be taking AP courses. I don’t think he will have an exceptional GPA or test scores, but he is quickly becoming an expert In cybersecurity activities. There are now competitions to identify the best high school hackers in the country because there will be a high demand for them. However most high school programs are still geared for kids learning the basics.

Have any colleges started recruiting hackers the way they do athletes? What I am reading is that the military, the intelligence community, and industry want to identify these kids while they are still in high school, but the educational pipeline still seems to be lacking. Other than the competitions or traditional CS programs, I haven’t found much being done st the college level.

2

Some schools have programs. Some schools send invitations to apply to top students or musicians or artists. There isn’t really a lot of recruiting like for a top quarterback.

He really needs top grades to draw the attention.

3

Should have said actively recruiting.

4

I think your time would be better spent identifying colleges/programs he would be interested in, looking up those scholarships, and see what is required for them. Do they need a certain gpa? Get that gpa. Do they need certain classes, activities, letters of recommendation? Take those, get those lined up. There are some government scholarships and he might be interested in those.

But it is unlikely they’ll come looking for him. Even with the top quarterbacks, most have to go looking for the schools, send game tapes to the coaches, promote themselves. If you want something, go after it.

5

A 9th grader has plenty of time to get more focused on grades and prepare for standardized tests. The reality is CS is the hottest major and there is going to be a ton of competition. There won’t be a work around that’s going to compensate for weak academics.

6

I am a college professor and parent of a hacker child, now in second year of college, studying CS. Like the other posts, I would also encourage the student to take a college prep track with math ,science, English etc all 4 years. The Cs or IT electives and activities are in addition to the main academics.

Since it is a competitive major, focus on grades and test scores. It’s okay if they’re not elite college level stats, but still need to be respectable enough for admission to a non flagship state university . That’s where my kid is and he is thriving and has a summer internship lined up because of his programming skills. Also, recruiters look for a minimum 3.0 college GPA for internships etc in addition to computer projects and other related EC’s.

Government agencies like NSA and CIA recruit top students from established university programs. There are programs like cyberpatriots for high school kids. But they are EC activities, not alternate tracks. The star kid who got some internship straight out of high school makes for a feel good news story, but not rooted in reality for most kids.

7

Good advice. I suppose I am aware of the power of sports because I know an athlete who is a tenth grader who is being contacted by Ivy League schools and big universities. He’s nationally ranked and they are coming to him. He’s a good student, but they don’t yet know his final GPA and test scores. So in some cases, the schools want you because of an exceptional skill, whether or not they know how you will finish up in high school.

8

This made me wonder if being a great cyberhacker will become comparable to sports.

“Arcidiacono noted that athletes with an academic rating of 1 or 2 on Harvard’s scale of 1 to 6—with 1 being the highest and 6 the lowest—had a markedly higher admit rate than non-athletes with the same academic scores. For example, Arcidiacono noted that recruited athletes with an academic rating of 4 had an acceptance rate of 70.46 percent, nearly a thousand times greater than the 0.076 percent admit rate for non-athletes with the same academic rating.”

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2018/6/30/athlete-admissions/

9

Look at RIT in greater Rochester NY. They have a tight co op relationship with the NSA in Maryland, which hires 20,000 math/CS/cybersecurity experts.

https://www.rit.edu/gccis/news/rit-named-national-center-academic-excellence-cyber-defense-research

The answer is YES, some schools pay attention to contests in hacking and also pay attention to FIRST robotics Dean List Winners and other national prizes. If your son can win a NATIONAL hacking contest it may help.

While this may not be a fit for your son, wait and see his grades and test scores, and try not to be so negative
about his potential, boys do get more mature with time!

MIT for certain gets information about students who get onto the national Deans list for FIRST robotics,
and they have an active admissions officer, who recruits Math Olympiad winners, thats the top sixteen math students
in the USA and looks for other national prize winners and may actually contact them because of those skills.

CMU also actively recruits math students, if they want to major in mathematics and not computer science.

Any national contest is actively TRACKED by some very selective schools out there. Tends to be schools like mIT
which have a relatively large Admissions team and can assign one person to recruit academic superstars.

But, a national prize is no guarantee for admission to MIT, or CMU, but note that CMU offers a special MERIT based
award for math students, that major in MATH not computer science or cybersecurity. They need to have demonstrated math skills such as very high AMC 10/12 score followed by AIME Exam or ARML team results
or math olympiad results.

Look into math exams, Colorado students can find and take AMC 10 and AMC 12 over much of the front range in
Colorado. There is a cutoff score to then sit for the AIME. These are national math exams that lead to a place
on a mathematics team.

There are computer related contests too and eventually they will get noticed, they are newer than the very established mathematics exams in the USA.

10

Check out: https://volgenau.gmu.edu/expertise/cyber-security