GOSHEN – A team of four first-year students from Robert McMann’s Cisco/CCNA Computer Networking Class at Orange-Ulster BOCES Career and Technical Education Center won the third-place in New York State Gold Tier award in the third round of the CyberPatriot Competition.
The competition is part of a cyber-education program conceived by the Air Force Association to inspire high school and middle school students toward careers in cybersecurity or other science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) — disciplines critical to the future and security of the United States.
The team members were: Phoenix Graham (Goshen HS), Oluseye Ilori (Pine Bush HS), Charles Mason (Minisink Valley HS) and Kevin Ward (Cornwall HS).
At the center of CyberPatriot is the National Youth Cyber Defense Competition, which puts teams of high school and middle school students in the position of newly hired IT professionals tasked with managing the network of a small company. Through a series of online competition rounds, teams are given a set of virtual operating systems and are tasked with finding and fixing cybersecurity vulnerabilities while maintaining critical services. Each round lasts six hours and involved more than 2,600 teams that entered this year in the open division.
Orange-Ulster BOCES Career and Technical Education programs give students the opportunity to graduate from high school with technical experience, professional skills, national industry certifications, and college credit in a wide variety of high-demand occupations. The Career and Technical Education Division has programs located on two campuses in Goshen, one on Gibson Road and the other at the Regional Education Center at Arden Hill.
