Union County College Professor Elizabeth K. Hawthorne explained Mentor-Connect and MentorLinks to participants of the Equity and Inclusion STEM Thought Leaders’ Summit held in conjunction with the 2018 ATE Principal Investigators Conference. 

As a Mentor-Connect mentee in 2015 and a current MentorLinks mentor Hawthorne is the perfect person to explain these two on-ramps to the Advanced Technological Education program.

“If it wasn’t for Mentor-Connect, Union County College wouldn’t have its new degree in cyberforensics,” she said.

Prior to being selected for Mentor-Connect, Hawthorn explained that she and colleagues at Union College had tried for two years to obtain an ATE grant. “We failed miserably,” she said during the Thought Leaders’ Summit session that was also attended by MentorLinks participants prior to the 2018 ATE Principal Investigators Conference.

The American Association of Community Colleges (AACC), a Mentor-Connect partner piloted the STEM Thought Leaders’ Summit this year. AACC has offered MentorLinks since 1999 and has also organized the ATE Principal Investigators Conference since 1994 with ATE grant support. Mentor-Connect is a project of the South Carolina Advanced Technological Education Center at Florence-Darlington Technical College. 

While the three outreach initiatives aim to broaden and increase participation in the ATE program, they work in distinct ways with teams of faculty and administrators:

• · The STEM Thought Leaders’ Summit was a two-day workshop to help faculty from minority-serving or rural institutions develop STEM technician education action plans that consider equity and inclusion.
• · MentorLinks provides a STEM education expert to work with colleges for two years while they improve an existing technician education program or start a new one.
• · Mentor-Connect provides technical resources and a mentor who offers advice over a nine-month period on colleges’ ATE grant proposals.    

“The most helpful thing Mentor-Connect provided was a mentor [Casey W. O’Brien] who matched our evaluation needs to an experienced external evaluator,” Hawthorne explained in an email. O’Brien is the executive director and principal investigator of the National CyberWatch Center.

As the principal investigator of the Cyber Service! Interdisciplinary & Experiential Education for Cyber Forensics Technicians project (#1601060) Hawthorne continues to use Mentor-Connect’s digital resources.

During her presentation she demonstrated how she used the keyword search function within Mentor-Connect’s online library to learn how to draw down funds from Union County College’s  $199,987 NSF award and account for her time and effort on the grant. These and other post-award tasks are her responsibility as the project’s principal investigator because the one person in the college’s grants office focuses on helping faculty prepare grant proposals.

During this fall, the degree program’s first semester, 18 students are taking the Digital Forensics Essentials and Linux Fundamentals courses, two of the courses that were developed with ATE grant support. The grant also covered the cost of digital forensics software and hardware tools in a dedicated classroom at the New Jersey college.

Fourteen community partners, including the state police and two universities, have agreed to serve as sites for the service-learning experience students must complete in a capstone course during their final semester. The program prepares students for careers as digital forensics technicians, digital forensics and eDiscovery associates, cyberforensics examiners, and cybersecurity incident handlers.

[Leading Photo: Elizabeth K. Hawthorne in Union County College lab]

[Secondary Photo: Elizabeth K. Hawthorne, who received Mentor-Connect mentoring in 2015, shared information about her Cyber Service! project during a showcase session at the 2018 Advanced Technological Education Principal Investigators Conference.]