Natasha Young is hacking for the greater good. The cybersecurity major is learning how to protect people in the digital world.  During her time at UM-Dearborn, she’s taken it a step further by encouraging her friends to participate in hackathon competitions. “A couple of my friends got together, and we felt like we wanted to take some of the skills that we had and really apply them,” she says. “We felt like sometimes, learning all of these different things in class, it's hard to understand it until you actually get to see it in action.” It’s not just fun and games though, the hackathon challenges are simulations of what can happen in the real world. The first challenge required her team to code a keyboard called Secure Keys, a biometric authenticator. The aspiring cybersecurity and digital forensics investigator wants to help solve complex problems and to “help bring justice to society.” 

Natasha, in her own words

On why she chose to study cybersecurity. “I chose that career path because of my motivation to take care [of] and protect people. I've been really inspired by computers and the complexity of them and being able to take that curiosity and apply it to help people. It’s something that I'm really passionate about. Participating in hackathons has been an invigorating experience. It's taking everything that you learned over the past couple years and actually applying it and facing a challenge and identifying pain points that can help people working collaboratively as a team. Often, we think we can do it ourselves but we can't and so being able to take different people with different backgrounds and different things that they've learned and bring them together and create something awesome and amazing that they can help someone else has been a great experience.”

On her experience as a cybersecurity ambassador. “Being a cybersecurity ambassador at Ford Motor Company has been a great experience for learning the ropes about what it takes to implement cybersecurity protocols and different rules and how to share those with users. Many people in the industry sometimes aren't fully aware of all the vulnerabilities and being a cybersecurity ambassador, I get to share what those vulnerabilities are and what you can do to protect yourself and the company. The experience of being able to be a cybersecurity ambassador has helped me apply what I've learned in school and see how it works in the real world and how to share it with others.”

On what makers her a Difference Maker. “What I think makes me a Difference Maker was, after coming back from the hackathons and inspiring other students to take on the challenge and to let them know that they are good enough and they have something to contribute. And not just computer science students, but students from all over the university with different backgrounds and disciplines. Before I knew it, we were having our own hackathons on campus. We started having our own challenges. Other students started getting together wanting to do coding competitions and then later on, just recently, we had our very first CTF, which is a cybersecurity Capture the Flag Competition — which is where teams compete trying to solve different cybersecurity-related issues.”