Angela Rivas / Contributing Writer
FIU students will now have the chance to protect companies from cyberattacks and dive into the human brain.
The Board of Trustees and Governors approved the cybersecurity and behavioral neuroscience degrees for undergraduate students.
Dr. Nagarajan Prabakar, an associate professor at the School of Computing and Information Services, proposed the bachelor of science in cybersecurity, in May of 2019.
Prabakar was inspired to create this degree after his students expressed interest in taking more cybersecurity courses.
Before FIU introduced this undergraduate degree, only two other Florida universities offered it: the University of West Florida and the University of South Florida.
“We were lacking this discipline and really wanted to start this program,” Prabakar said.
Several new classes were added with the degree, including Introduction to Database, Secure C Programming, and Enterprise Cybersecurity.
Only a “handful of students [are] currently enrolled,” Prabakar said, due to them missing fall term registration deadlines. But “there is a surge of students who want to transfer.”
Prabakar predicts 30-50 students will join later on in the semester.
Annie Brigido, a sophomore, and former computer engineering majoring is now studying cybersecurity.
“I ended up switching to it because it is this wonderful combination of computer science and engineering technology,” she said.
Currently, Brigido is taking prerequisite courses but is most excited to delve into classes such as digital forensics engineering and computing and network security.
Brigido sees her future in cybersecurity as influential in today’s society.“To be able to help protect people’s information is so important, especially in this new tech-driven world,” Brigido said.
Another student who is looking forward to her future is Delaney Dockstader, a current psychology major, and prospective behavioral neuroscience student.
Dockstader is a new psychology major, transferring this past summer term from recreation and sports management.
Her newfound love for neuroscience was unexpected, she said, and she will be joining the program in the spring of 2021.
“I had just finished writing a paper on traumatic brain injuries in athletes and I blinked and I was 15 pages in. I was in love with it,” she said.
Dockstader is currently taking her prerequisite courses but says she is looking forward to the whole curriculum, and to get into research and labs with professors.
The professor who introduced the idea of a bachelor’s in behavioral neuroscience is Dr. Leila Allen, assistant teaching professor for the neuroscience upper-division courses in the psychology department.
Allen began the program’s initiation in 2018 and got approval in July of 2020.
Allen, like Prabakar, was inspired to create this new degree after students requested additional neuroscience courses.
“Every survey I conducted after my classes said that so many students wanted to take more [neuroscience] classes,” she said.
Dockstader believes these new degrees are a good opportunity for students.
“It is going to be a journey of self-discovery and taking all these different courses are going to be enlightening,” she said.
About Post Author
