00:54 - Emily’s Superpower: Being a Good Teacher

• Greater Than Code Episode 261: Celebrating Computer Science Education with Dave Bock


• CyberPatriot

06:24 - Online College Courses vs In-Person Learning / Emily’s Community College Path

• Network Engineering


• Virginia Tech


• Guaranteed Transfer Programs


• Loudoun Codes
  
  
  
  
  • Emily Haggard: My Path to Virginia Tech
  
  

11:58 - Computer Science Curriculums

• Technical Depth


• The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

19:28 - Being A Good Mentor / Mentor, Student Relationships

• Using Intuition


• Putting Yourself in Others’ Mindsets


• Diversity and Focusing On Commonalities


• Addressing Gatekeeping in Tech


• Celebrating Accomplishments


• Bragging Loudly


• Grace Hopper Conference


• Cultural Dynamics Spread

38:24 - Dungeons & Dragons

• Characters as an Extensions of Players

Reflections:

Dave: College is what you make of it, not where you went.

Arty: Teaching people better who don’t have a lot of experience yet.

Mandy: “Empowered women, empower women.” Empowered men also empower women.

Emily: Your mentor should have different skills from you and you should seek them out for that reason.

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Transcript:

MANDY: Hey, everybody! Welcome to Episode 265 of Greater Than Code. My name is Mandy Moore and I'm here with our guest panelist, Dave Bock.

DAVE: Hi, I'm David Bock and I am here with our usual co-host, Arty Starr.

ARTY: Thank you, Dave. And I'm here today with our guest, Emily Haggard.

Emily is graduating from Virginia Tech with a Bachelor’s in Computer Science this past December so, congratulations. She has a wide variety of experience in technology from web development to kernel programming, and even network engineering and cybersecurity. She is an active member of her community, having founded a cybersecurity club for middle schoolers. In her free time, she enjoys playing Dungeons and Dragons and writing novels.

Welcome to the show, Emily.

EMILY: Thank you.

ARTY: So our first question we always ask is what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?

EMILY: So I spent some time thinking about this and I would say that my superpower is that I'm a good teacher and what that means is that the people who come to me with questions wanting to learn something number one, my goal is to help them understand and number two, I think it's very important to make sure that whatever gap we have in our experience doesn't matter and that they don't feel that. So that they could be my 6-year-old brother and I'm trying to teach him algebra, or something and he doesn't feel like he is the 6-year-old trying to learn algebra.

DAVE: I'll echo that sentiment about being a good teacher actually on two fronts, Emily. First of all, I am teaching your brother now in high school and just the other day, he credited you towards giving him a lot of background knowledge about the course and the curriculum before we ever started the class. So he seconds that you're a good teacher.

And then listeners might remember, I was on a few weeks ago talking about my nonprofit and Emily was there at the beginning of me starting to volunteer in high schools. In fact, the way I met Emily, it was the fall of 2014.

The first time I was volunteering at Loudoun Valley High School and one morning prior to class, there was going to be a meeting of a cybersecurity club. There were a bunch to the students milling about and there was this sophomore girl sitting in front of a computer, looking at a PowerPoint presentation of networking IP addresses, how the /24 of an IP address resolves and just all that kind of detail. Like very low-level detail about networking stuff and I was like, “Oh, that's interesting.” I wouldn't have expected a sophomore girl to be so interested in the low-level type of details of IP. And then the club started and she got up and started giving that presentation. That was not a slide deck she was reading; it was a slide deck she was creating.

EMILY: Thank you. I actually remember that. [laughs]

ARTY: So how did you acquire that superpower?

EMILY: I think it was out of necessity. So going back to the story that David mentioned in high school, there was a cybersecurity competition called CyberPatriot that I competed in with friends and one year, all of a sudden, they just introduced network engineering to the competition. We had to configure and troubleshoot a simulated network and no one knew how to do that.

So I took it upon myself to just figure it out so that my team could be competitive and win, but then part of the way that I learn actually is being able to teach something like that's how I grasp. I know that I've understood something and I'm ready to move on to the next topic is like, if I could teach this thing.

So actually, I started out building all of that as a way to kind of condense my notes and condense my knowledge so that it’d stick in my head for the competition and I just realized it's already here, I should share this. So that's how I started there. Teaching network engineering to high schoolers that don't have any background knowledge is really hard. It forced me to put it in terms that would make sense and take away the really technical aspects of it and I think that built the teaching skill.

DAVE: That relates to the club you started at the middle school for a CyberPatriot. How did that start?

EMILY: That was initially a desire to have a capstone project and get out of high school a few weeks early. But I was sitting there with my friend and thinking about, “Okay, well, we need to do something that actually helps people. What should we do?” Like some people are going out and they're painting murals in schools, or gardening. It was like, well, we don't really like being outside and we're not really artistic. [chuckles] But what we do have is a lot of technical knowledge from all this work with CyberPatriot and we know that CyberPatriot has a middle school competition.

So we actually approached the middle school. We had a sit down with, I think the dean at our local middle school. We talked about what CyberPatriot was and what we wanted to do with the students, which was have them bust over to the high school so we could teach them as an afterschool program. I guess we convinced him and so, a couple months later they're busing students over for us to teach.

DAVE: Wow. And did they ever participate in competitions as middle schoolers?

EMILY: Yes, they did.

DAVE: Very cool.

EMILY: Yeah.

DAVE: Can you go into what those competitions are like? I don't think most of the audience even knows that exists.

EMILY: Yeah, sure.

So CyberPatriot, it's a cybersecurity competition for predominantly high schoolers that's run by the Air Force and you have a couple rounds throughout the year, I think it’s like five, or so, and at each round you have 6 hours and you're given some virtual machines, which you have to secure and remove viruses from and things, and you get points for doing all of that.

They added on network simulation, which was with some Cisco proprietary software, which would simulate your routers, your firewalls, and everything. So you'd have to configure and troubleshoot that as well and you would get points for the same thing.

It builds a lot of comradery with all of us having to sit there for 6 hours after school and like, we're getting tired. It's a Friday night, everyone's a little bit loopy and all we've eaten is pizza for 6 hours. [laughs]

DAVE: Well, that's a good jumpstart to your career, I think. [laughs]

EMILY: Yes, for sure.

MANDY: So while in college, I'm guessing that – well, I'm assuming that you've been pretty impacted by COVID and doing in-person learning versus online learning. How's that been for you?

EMILY: I've actually found it pushes me to challenge the status quo. Online college classes, for the most part, the lectures aren't that helpful. They're not that great. So I had to pick up a lot of skills, like learning to teach myself, reading books, and figuring out ways to disce