Honors College

Graduating senior Mitchell Martinez overcame challenges to reach new heights

Colleen Rich — Mon, 10 May 2021 14:34:35 +0000

Graduating senior Mitchell Martinez overcame challenges to reach new heights Colleen Rich Mon, 05/10/2021 - 10:34

Mitchell Martinez. Photo provided

“When you have the ability to do what you love, love what you do and have the ability to impact people. … That’s having a life of success.”

George Mason University’s Mitchell Martinez has never met former college football icon Tim Tebow, but the graduating senior couldn’t believe more in his definition of success.

That’s how Martinez, 22, also feels as he concludes an extraordinary career of collegiate achievement while at Mason and looks ahead to the next chapter of his life. Overcoming personal and financial hardships along the way, the cyber security engineering major from the Volgenau School of Engineering and Honors College student is poised to become the first in his family to earn an advanced degree and secure a high-paying job.

Martinez is already a cyber security engineer at CACI, where he began as an intern, and plans to eventually pursue a PhD in computer science.

“This might not seem as big of a deal to others,” he said, “but getting here as a Hispanic was not easy, and I want to make it easier for others.”

Working nearly full time since the beginning of his tenure at Mason, Martinez attended classes during the day before going straight to work until late at night and then staying up until the wee hours of the morning doing math homework before starting the day all over again.

Despite the frenetic schedule, he nonetheless found time to be involved socially in the Theta Tau Professional Engineering fraternity and seven intramural title-winning athletic teams. Martinez also spent a semester studying abroad in Switzerland prior to the global pandemic.

He found his passion and professional interest at CACI International Inc., a Northern Virginia-based firm that provides information technology and network solutions for the defense, intelligence and e-government sectors. Martinez has particular interest in offensive security, culminating in a year-long research project that focused on developing a cyberattack platform that can be mounted on working dogs. He then took his experiences to develop a sophisticated attack evasion tool for his senior design sponsor, Lockheed Martin Space.

“In this field, it is the goal of penetration testers and security developers to identify the weaknesses of systems—novel or complex—and work alongside engineers to not only prevent future attacks, but also optimize those systems for usability,” he said.

Martinez, who grew up in Lewis Center, Ohio, before eventually landing in Virginia with his family, attributed his competitiveness and his own innate curiosity for drawing him to computer security.

Martinez, who hopes to pursue a career in cybersecurity management and someday become a professor, credited his mentor Thomas Winston, an assistant professor for cyber security engineering within Volgenau, for having the greatest influence on him at Mason.

Winston called Martinez an “amazing person, with unbounded potential.”

“He was in many of my classes, always did an outstanding job and always showed the very best of student scholarship, motivation, drive and just overall interest,” Winston said of Martinez. “Honestly, I will likely remember Mitch for many years to come. He was a shining star in the cyber security program.”

Topics

Students

Graduation

Honors College

Volgenau School of Engineering

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Doreen Joseph

rstaffo2 — Fri, 16 Apr 2021 19:12:53 +0000

Doreen Joseph rstaffo2 Fri, 04/16/2021 - 15:12

“I feel like I held myself back for a long time not really believing in myself and then, when I started doing things, I was always capable of a lot more than I thought I was.”

Doreen Joseph, Honors College Cyber Security Engineering graduate, 2019

Doreen Joseph, who graduated in Spring 2019 with a B.S. in Cyber Security Engineering, maintains her passion for supporting underrepresented students as they access spaces that might otherwise be out of reach.

Photo provided.

While at Mason, Joseph was an active member of the Honors College. Joseph was also a true exemplar of the Honors College's commitment to interdisciplinary learning, leading the Pre-College Initiative for Mason’s chapter of the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE) and the Honors College Multicultural Alliance (HCMA), then known as the Honors College Black Ambition. An emerging leader, she encouraged students to explore under-utilized resources available on campus.

Now, Joseph is attending a fully-funded PhD program in Computer Science at the University of California, Davis.

At Davis, she continues to wear the many hats she picked up during her time at Mason. Joseph serves as a board member on the Coordinating Council on Graduate Affairs (CCGA), a committee on the UC Systemwide Academic Senate and the University Committee on Affirmative Action, Diversity, and Equity (UCAADE), as well as on Davis’s Chancellor's Graduate & Professional Student Advisory Board (CGPSA).

“I joined the committees because when I was at Mason, I was part of the president's student advisory group for two years as well, so I thought that would be a continuation of that. I've learned a lot.”

As a board member, Joseph advises the Office of the Chancellor and advocates on the behalf of graduate and professional students, giving her an opportunity to lift the voices of underrepresented students in the university system, and make recommendations to amend unjust policies.

“[One group I’m part of] at UC Davis is focused on anti-racism.” The group, UC Davis Graduate Studies Working Group on Anti-Racism, focuses on recruitment and retention of UC Davis’s students of color. “We design short term, medium term, long term solutions to [adjust] university policies for recruitment to make them more anti-racist and more social justice-oriented.”

Just as she did at Mason, Joseph is constantly in search of new learning opportunities at UC Davis. “[In] The College of Engineering, we're looking for a new dean, so I've been involved as part of their recruitment advisory committee. It has been a really demanding process, but we're on the tail end of it now. That’s been good because I had no idea what a dean does before I became part of this committee.”

“When I started at Mason, I just had the intention of getting my degree and getting out, you know?” says Joseph, reflecting on how she got involved in so many different spheres of the university. Then, in her UNIV 100: Introduction to Mason course, Joseph was given an assignment that asked her to meet with a faculty member to discuss her future. “I met with Dr. LaNitra Berger because I knew I was interested in doing a PhD in a cyber security-related field, and when I met with her, she said, ‘You basically want to focus on two things: maintaining good grades and leadership,’ so that set the trajectory for the rest of my time at Mason and [beyond].”

In addition to her passion for cyber security engineering and computer science, through her service on student-led advisory committees, Joseph has also discovered a passion for higher education administration.

“I never considered education as a field that I would go into, but I [have been] doing all these different leadership things, sitting on advisory committees and trying to be where decisions are made for the university to kind of see how the whole enterprise runs.”

In both realms, STEM and education, Joseph knows that she wants to bring her values of service and diverse thought to the table, making sure to uplift the voices of students who have been marginalized. In the past year, she has found an intersection between the two: mentoring young girls in computer science. When planning for this mentorship, Joseph asked herself how she could make this relevant to these young girls.

“[Capturing the girls’ attention] included talking about computer science in fashion [instead of just] coding — I like coding, but I'd be bored if I had to do that every single day for the rest of my life.” As she moves through the two fields, Joseph is committed to “finding different ways to capture the audience and talk about an interesting aspect of the field,” that can draw in students who otherwise might not have seen a future for themselves in STEM spaces.

For Joseph, the commitment to inclusion and empowerment of students is deeply personal. “I feel like I've been very fortunate with all the different opportunities I’ve had, so I just want to make sure that other students have those opportunities as well,” she reflects.

“Part of it is being an example in just the way that you live, but it’s also about being intentional about helping others out and encouraging and empowering them to become the best they can become. I feel like I held myself back for a long time not really believing in myself and then, when I started doing things, I was always capable of a lot more than I thought I was.”

Referring to the multitude of opportunities available to Honors College students, Joseph says, “the whole point of college is to find what you're interested in and you can't do that if you don't try out different things. You may try something and then figure out that you really hated it, and that's okay. Now, that's a piece of information that you have that you wouldn't have had before.”

Joseph’s advice to current Honors College students is simple: “Explore!”

Topics

Honors College

Cybersecurity