In 1977, Stephen Northcutt ’81 left his job as a U.S. Navy helicopter search-and-rescue crewman and headed to Mary Washington to study geology. Today, he is a leading expert in cyber security. The career path wasn’t obvious, but Northcutt excels at seeing − and seizing − opportunities that others don’t. He spent the last 12 years as CEO of the SANS Institute, a cooperative research and education organization he helped launch in 1989. SANS − an acronym for “systems administration, networking, and security” − offers information-security training and certification. If a professional receives SANS Institute’s rigid Global Information Assurance Certification, it means he has high-level skills in one of more than 20 branches of security and development. Today, Northcutt’s focus is developing the SANS Technology Institute, a Maryland-based cyber security graduate school that offers master-of-science degrees in information-security engineering and management. “In my previous … [Read more...]
Activist Occupied With Social Justice
In September 2011, Philip Arnone ’08 went to a protest in lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park. An experienced activist, he had seen nascent protest movements before – and he had seen most of them fall apart. Unimpressed, he didn’t think the one in the Financial District would last. “We had a few arrests that day, not much,” he said of what would become the Occupy Wall Street movement. “It was kind of anticlimactic.” A week later, protesters still held the park. That’s when impatient police officers swooped in to make arrests, and things got rough. “I’ve seen police violence before, but it had never been on the level that it was that day,” Arnone said. He fled, then found himself organizing others who had escaped. He led a march to police headquarters to demand that those who were arrested be released; then he joined the other protesters as they returned to the Zuccotti Park. “After I’d done that, I was hooked,” he said. “And things just escalated from there.” As protests … [Read more...]