My graduate school experience at East Carolina University - ICTN6823 Information Security Management

ICTN 6823 - Information Security Management.


Finally, by the time I started this course, I was finished with my core courses and ready to start into my concentration. (Note: Click http://www.tecs.ecu.edu/departments/technology_systems/graduate_programs/MS_technology_systems/information_security.html

to go to the course catalog.)



ICTN 6823 was the first course in my concentration. I took this course in the Summer of 2007 and had the great Dr. Phil Lunsford as my professor (http://www.tecs.ecu.edu/departments/technology_systems/faculty_and_staff/lunsford.html)



We used the textbook Management of Information Security by Whitman & Mattord http://www.amazon.com/Readings-Cases-Management-Information-Security/dp/0619216271/ref=pd_rhf_shvl_1

This class was a combination of book reading, assignments and a final paper submitted to a place for publishing.

A lot of the assignments involved using cryptography to hide files within another file. We used a tool called TrueCrypt. Since my class, TrueCrypt has released a major version - 6.0 - that's supposed to be a lot better. I need to check that out.

The book's topics were very high level on information security. It talks of planning at the CIO level and the security software development life cycle. We looked at risk analysis and contingency planning from a CIO level point of view. One of the important topics that seem to follow me through the course was of the organization's security policy.

Our class "met" in text chat along with the professor. Dr. Lunsford never really required us to show for class but we could attend in case we had questions. Dr. Lunsford usually let us lead the class discussion but if it got slow, he would throw some security topics out there for us.

We had to write a term paper for the class and submit it for publication. My paper was on the topic of Blueprint for Web Application Security. This paper was destined to be a how to guide on guiding a software development team on considering secure ways of programming to shore up defenses. In addition, creating a security awareness training program for developers was an idea on getting developers thinking about what things can creep into a web application and how to stop them. This was a high level paper and I will have to admit, not a very good paper. I guess the more that I know now, I can look back at this paper and spot the inconsistencies.

Needless to say, my paper didn't get published!

My graduate school experience at ECU - 3rd semester: ITEC6406 Cost Analysis for Technology

All I can say is Wow! This was probably my most difficult class. Matter of fact, I ended up dropping it the first time that I took it. In the end, I suffered through it and made out with an A.

My instructor was Dr. Paul Petersen: http://www.tecs.ecu.edu/departments/technology_systems/faculty_and_staff/petersen.html

Dr. Petersen was one of the most debated professors in my program so far. Some students loved him and a lot had problems with his methods. What stood Dr. Petersen out in the program was his willingness to record every classroom lecture and post on ECU's Global Classroom site. He taught an undergraduate level course on the same subject which is the lectures that he recorded. What was hilarious was that in the recorded lectures he often spoke of his graduate class with some less than flattering remarks. I can't remember any specifics but they were funny. Some of the students in my class took exception to these comments. I believe these were the students who didn't do so well.

This the text book that we used: Canada, John R., William G. Sullivan, John A. White, and Dennis Kulonda. Capital Investment Analysis for Engineering and Management, 3rd Edition. Pearson Education, 2005. ISBN 0-13-143408-X

Funny thing about this was that John Canada either taught or was a student at NC State. A guy that I used to work with went to classes with Canada. This book was not well received from some of the comments in Amazon. I found the book hard to follow - it was not well written in my opinion. It made the course even more difficult.

We also were required to download case studies from Harvard Business Online: one was Destin Brass Products case study and the other was The Super Project. Each case study counted towards 20% of the final grade.

We also had a few take home exams and a final group project. I was lucky enough to get in with a good group. I had a smart guy who worked in Wilmington for a chemical laboratory. We did a cost analysis of 3 different vendor's mass spectrometer instruments with the goal of recommending one.

Here is a breakdown of the rest of the topics we studied:

1) Costs - incremental versus fixed costs. Direct and indirect costs.
2) Compounding interest - finding out when you will triple your investments, continuous compounding
3) Calculating capital recovery for purchased equipments - MARR
4) Calculating internal rate of return and external rates of return
5) Calculating inflation - speaking in terms of today's dollars versus future dollars
6) Determining how much money you will have to invest to pay for expansions.
7) Activity based costing

This is the class that I will need to review very hard for my comp. exam.

My graduate school experience: 2nd semester - ITEC 6000: Statistical Applications In Industry

The second of the core courses was my statistics class that I took in Spring of 2006. It was a tough class but it was also a great course. My instructor Dr. Paul Kauffman, ECU's department of engineering chair, http://www.tecs.ecu.edu/alumni/TECS_newsletter/nexus/nexusVol2no6.htm#4 was one of the most organized professor. He knew exactly how to conduct a distance education course. What he did was record lectures that had himself explaining the stat subject we were studying at the time. This helped a great deal to understand the tougher concepts. He also created and made available for download good PowerPoint presentations.

Another cool thing is that we used Excel to build alot of our homework submissions. I learned many of the built in Excel functions and the book usually had a section for each chapter that showed you how to build a spreadsheet.

Here is a snapshot of what we studied:

1) Data collection using surveys - Good interesting start to the semester. I actually used this information to help my team create a user survey to get input on how they liked our software.

2) Analyzing large data sets using frequency distributions and displaying histograms.

3) Measures of central tendency (mean, median, quartile ranges).

4) Data variation and shape using box and whisker plots.

5) Coefficient of correlation to measure strength of linear relationship

6) Probability.

There are a few more things that I need to look up. Plus the book, I will post the book title when I get back to work.