Major: B.S. Computer Science ’14
Hometown: New Windsor, MD
Oliver Kubik knew that Computer Science was for him starting in the 7th grade when he played with madlib style programs on his basement computer. Now a Junior working toward his B.S. in Computer Science at UMBC, Oliver has plans to one day pursue a Ph.D. In Fall 2012, he was chosen as one of UMBC’s inaugural NSF Scholarship for Service CyberCorps program scholars.
What Oliver likes about Information Assurance and Cybersecurity is the problem solving and detective work. “Everything must be analyzed much more in depth than conventional software applications whose bugs typically have minor consequences,” he says. “I think that securing mobile devices will be very important in the future.”
A Meyerhoff Scholar, Oliver is part of UMBC’s Cyber Defense Club and Ultimate Frisbee team. In Summer 2012, he pursued undergraduate research at the University of Connecticut, comparing the strengths of Amazon’s EC2 and Windows’ Azure cloud computing systems. “My results didn’t show a clear superiority of one system over another, but I did learn a lot about academic research, especially in the importance of organizing the data that is collected.”
His Freshman year, Oliver interned at System’s Alliance in Hunt Valley, creating an automated testing framework for their web portal, to speed up the logging of bugs. Here he learned about the complexities of web pages and the Selenium web automation tool. That summer he did similar work as an intern at Booz Allen Hamilton.
As part of the SFS program, he hops to intern at the National Security Agency. His plans after graduating in May 2014 are to explore work in the governmental sphere before pursuing a Ph.D. in Cybersecurity.