The U.S. Department of Defense is offering Cyber Information Assurance Scholarships to U.S. citizens who will be Juniors, Seniors, or graduate students in the fall of 2017. This is a one-year scholarship covering full books, tuition, and a $22,500 stipend for undergraduates or a $30,000 stipend for graduate students. The scholarships are renewable but will require a new application each year. Payback is one year of federal service in a cyber security or digital forensics role for each year of scholarship, or four years of military service. Applicants must be eligible for a security clearance. Applicants are not limited to students in the Department of Information Technology and Management but may also be students in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, and Business, but because of the nature of the application, knowledge of and a clear understanding of cyber security is a necessity. A printed and signed physical application must be delivered to the ITM Department office, Perlstein Hall suite 223 later than 8:30am Monday May 22nd so we can evaluate and include your scholarship in our funding request, which is due May 31st. The application and details of the scholarship are included below. (Note: if you downloaded the announcement or application prior to 11:00am on Wednesday, April 19th, please download them again as the DOD provided us with updated copies.)
ATTACHMENT C IA Scholarship and Vacancy Announcement 2017
ATTACHMENT D NEW Student Application 2017-2018 (site 1)
ATTACHMENT D NEW Student Application 2017-2018 (site 2)

Contact Professor Ray Trygstad for questions: trygstad@iit.edu. Please include “DOD Cyber Scholarship” as the first thing in the subject line of your email.

Advising notes for the 2017 summer and fall semesters are now available for undergraduate students in ITM. Updated 3/21/17. Three locations for maximum redundancy! Fall 2017 ITM Undergraduate Advising Notes
http://naperville.rice.iit.edu/Fall2017ITMUndergraduateAdvisingNotes.pdf
http://itm.iit.edu/data/Fall2017ITMUndergraduateAdvisingNotes.pdf

A new IT professional association will emerge this spring as CompTIA, home of the A+, Linux+, and Network+ certifications absorbs the Association of Information Technology Professionals. From these pieces the new association will emerge, and students have the opportunity to get onboard at the ground floor with a very minimal expense: twenty-nine bucks! See the full details at http://www.land.certification.comptia.org/CompTIA-IT-Pro-Association.

Graduate, undergraduate, and women’s scholarships are offered by the Center for Cyber Safety and Education of the International Information System Security Certification Consortium (ISC)². They will begin accepting applications on February 28, 2017 for graduate and undergraduate scholarships of up to $5,000, and are currently accepting applications for women’s scholarships of $8,000 or more. One undergraduate student may also be selected for the Harold F. Tipton Memorial Scholarship; the most recent award recipient for this scholarship is Kyle Dean Murbach from Wheaton, IL. Please see the (ISC)² scholarship page at https://www.isc2cares.org/Scholarships/ for full details.

ITM is happy to be in Boston! In the photo at right, Master of Cyber Forensics and Security alumnus Anthony Ramirez receives the Best Paper Award for the 2016 ACM Research in Information Technology (RIIT) conference in Boston. Anthony and Alfedo Fernandez earned this award for their paper MP3 Stegonography: Analyzing and Detecting TCSteg. This is the third time in five years that Illinois Tech Information Technology and Management researchers have received this award. The School of Applied Technology and the ITM Department are Silver Sponsors for the RIIT conference and the concurrent ACM Special Interest Group in Information Technology Education (SIGITE) conference. ITM Associate Chair Ray Trygstad serves on the SIGITE Executive Committee.

The Women in CyberSecurity (WiCyS) 2017 conference will be held in Tucson, AZ on March 31st-April 1st. Scholarships are available for both faculty and students to attend the conference (details at ; in the past these scholarships, funded by NSF, have covered airfare and lodging. Student and faculty scholarship applications are now open through November 21st. Notifications will go out December 5th. Conference registration costs are nominal–$30 for students, $150 for faculty.

The Call for Participation for Presentations, Workshops, Birds-of-a-Feather (BOF) Sessions, Lightning Talks, Panels, and Posters is open, and submissions will be accepted until November 6 (details at https://www.csc.tntech.edu/wicys/participate/)

All ITM women enrolled in Cyber Forensics and Security, and all third- and fourth-year undergraduate women, are strongly encouraged to participate—lightning talks and posters are easy and can be drawn from work already done—and to apply for these scholarships.

Free books are always nice. There are a fair number of textbooks released regularly under the Creative Commons or GNU Free Documentation Licenses, and not surprisingly many of them are on IT subjects…oh, and on discrete mathematics. (We hear ITM students may need a little boost there.) These books may be a good supplement to a course or may just help you learn something new on your own. Read more…

IBM has made a large variety of educational resources available for free in the areas of big data, touching both data management and data analytics. This includes both pre-defined learning tracks and individual courses. Most courses take 3 to 8 hours to complete and can be entirely done using either open source tools or the resources on the IBM Bluemix cloud, available though our Software! portal at http://www.itm.iit.edu/software/webstore.html. These courses are a great supplement for students in the MIS or Data Management curriculum who want to build their knowledge and abilities in analytics and big data management using tools like Spark, Hadoop, Seahorse, Jupyter, R, Rstudio, System T, Watson, and Scala. To access the courses, go to https://bigdatauniversity.com/.

The Computing Accreditation Commission (CAC) of ABET recently completed its assessment of the Bachelor of Information Technology and Management Program within the School of Applied Technology at Illinois Tech and has accredited the program. ITM is the first ABET-accredited Information Technology program in Illinois. Full details of the accreditation and the meaning for ITM undergrads is at https://appliedtech.iit.edu/news/2016/sep/08/information-technology-and-management-program-itm-illinois-tech-earns-abet. Our accreditation dates from October 2014. Thus, everyone who has received the Bachelor of Information Technology and Management (BITM) degree since December 2014 is now a graduate of an ABET-accredited program.

Since Dell’s purchase of EMC, there is a considerable increase in opportunities for our students at Dell and Dell EMC. Dell’s University Relations (UR) program broadens opportunities for internships and new hires, with an ultimate goal of hiring 25 percent of all external hires from university campuses by the end of year 2020. See all the details for both internship opportunities and new hires at https://jobs.dell.com/students.