My favorite movie is Casablanca, and the final line is beyond memorable. Rick Blaine, played by
Humprey Bogart, has been allowed to escape a possible murder charge for shooting a Nazi officer, and
he turns to Louis Renault, played by Claude Raines: “Louie, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful
friendship.”
The line has come to mind recently as the Gateway Higher Education Cybersecurity Consortium and the
Global Center for Cybersecurity @ Cortex have forged a very productive partnership.
We co-sponsored an educational event and career fair at Cortex last spring; Our president and board
chair, Dean Simone Cummings has joined the GCC Board of Directors; and we were invited to participate
in the center’s strategic planning session in late July.
Dean Cummings has also worked with Danijela Bule from GCC to establish a Midwest affiliate of Women
in Cybersecurity, with the dean serving as chair.
That’s just the beginning:
- We’re planning a members’ roundtable event in downtown Clayton where GCC members can
meet our administrators and cybersecurity instructors and let us know what they are looking for
when they hire new employees. - We’re hard a work planning a pair of high school outreach events in October, one at Cortex and
the other at St. Louis Community College’s Florissant Valley campus. Those events are being
planning in conjunction with the Security Advisors Alliance and are expected to introduce
several hundred high school students to the emotional and financial benefits of entering the
cybersecurity field. - We’re also planning a full-day event we’re calling CyberFest! Which will feature leaders in the
field and concluding with a career fair for our students to meet Chief Information Security
Officers and hiring managers from GCC member organizations.
And we have more good news. St. Louis Community College and St. Charles Community College have
joined our consortium, allowing our institutions to work even more closely together to provide exciting
and enlightening cybersecurity curricula to students seeking a career in the field.
Exciting Times