2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Research for students can be an essential addition in the education of future professionals, particularly in rapidly developing areas such as cybersecurity. The future workplaces require professionals that can identify, analyze, act, and document findings as part of their profession. Students who graduate having absorbed these skills are better positioned to be effective in the cybersecurity profession, thus benefiting society overall. In this paper, we discuss one potential opportunity for research experience provided by the CyberCorps®: Scholarships for Service (SFS) program, managed by the National Science Foundation, in collaboration with the U.S. Office of Personnel Management and the Department of Homeland Security. The SFS program provides students with scholarships in support of education in the areas that are relevant to cybersecurity. In return recipients agree to work after graduation for the federal government in a position related to cybersecurity for a period of equal length of the scholarship. SFS programs aim to recruit scholars that have a high probability of graduation; thus, the profile of these students will be high-GPA, mature, self-driven and responsible—qualities that align well with researchers. However, it is not a requirement of the SFS program that students complete any research experiences or research endeavors, i.e., participating in research or publishing scholarly work. Engagement in research during their academic years opens potential future advanced degree avenues for the students after they fulfill their service commitment. The potential to contribute to the state-of-the-art research is attractive to all top scholar students and cybersecurity students are not an exception especially that the domain is advancing so rapidly. Being equipped with invaluable practical experience, deciding to return to school will make those students sought-after by all advanced degree cybersecurity programs. Given that the scholarship commitment is documented through the SFS program management office, SFS PIs maintain the contact with the scholarship graduates until they complete the required work and can advise the scholars on their intended advanced degrees if the scholars intend to pursue this opportunity. Having contributed in the past to creative scholarship will make these potential students an ideal recruiting pool for the SFS PIs to enlarge their research groups. In this paper we examine through observations two SFS sites, and how students, if given the opportunity, will engage in research activities. For those students that are involved in research, we conducted an interview, capturing their profile, the benefits they are observing in their professional development, and their intended careers after completing their service commitment. We report on these results and discuss ways to encourage further engagement with SFS scholars for research.