Tabitha Senty, a networking and cybersecurity instructor at Rosemont High School in Minnesota. Her courses provide in-depth training in networking fundamentals, routing, switching, wireless networking, and cybersecurity tools like firewalls and VPNs.
A summary of the episode
Tabitha discusses the importance of hands-on, practical cybersecurity education for high school students. She emphasizes the need for students to understand industry standards, technical skills assessments, and the ethical implications of cybersecurity work.
She also shares insights on the value of personal and professional growth and the opportunities for women in the cybersecurity field. She believes the future of cybersecurity education must adapt to emerging technologies like AI and focus on developing essential hands-on skills.
Listen to the episode
A full transcript of the interview
Steve Bowcut:
Thank you for joining us today for the Cybersecurity Guide podcast. My name is Steve Bowcut. I am a writer and an editor for Cybersecurity Guide and the podcast’s host. We appreciate your listening.
Today our guest is Tabitha Senty. Tabitha is a networking and cybersecurity instructor. We’re going to be talking about cybersecurity education and the broader impact it has on young people. And as you get to know Tabitha a little bit, you’ll see that she’s well qualified to talk about this subject. So let me tell you a little bit about her.
Tabitha Senty is a dedicated networking and cybersecurity instructor at District 196 career development teaching at Rosemont High School in Minnesota. Tabitha is a true advocate for equipping students with the technical skills and personal confidence that they need to succeed in the rapidly involving field of cybersecurity. Her courses designed for juniors and seniors provide hands-on training in networking fundamentals, routing switching, wireless networking, and even guides students through building homemade routers.
Through her curriculum, students gain both practical skills and a deeper understanding of cybersecurity and how modern networks operate essential foundations for those. Considering a future in tech beyond technical skills, Tabitha is passionate about helping students achieve personal growth, encouraging them to explore who they are and what they want to accomplish and how to take ownership of their goals.
She believes cybersecurity education is not only about understanding networks, but also about empowering students to become resilient, self-driven individuals ready to shape their own paths. Her dedication to both skill building and character development makes her a powerful influence in students’ lives. And today she’s here to share insights into her approach to cybersecurity education and the broader impact it has on young people entering this field. And with that, welcome to Tabitha. Thank you for joining me today.
Tabitha Senty:
Thank you for having me. Good morning. How are you today?
Steve Bowcut:
I am well. Very well, and I’m so excited to have you here. As you’re aware, this is a little bit different than some of the guests we’ve had. We usually kind of go after academics at a graduate school level, but I think there’s a whole segment that we really haven’t addressed well, and that is high school students and that’s where we are so excited to have you on the show today. So with that, let’s get a little bit more background. Tell us a little bit about how you decided the decisions, the path that got you to where you are, what drove you to do what you do?
Tabitha Senty:
So most people my age, the typical cybersecurity realm wasn’t available to us as we went through college and those kind of things. And I actually originally started in healthcare and I worked at the help desk, IT help desk and switchboard at the college to pay for work study to help me pay for my college degree. So that’s kind of where I got my first taste of it. And I loved it, but that wasn’t my path. I wasn’t driven. I was going to be a doctor, this is what I was going to do. And it ended up being life happens and things change and you kind of ebb and flow throughout your world. And so I ended up working in healthcare for almost a decade. Ended up in a doctor’s office during the transition from paper, medical records to electronic. And I got to work behind the scenes, help our office code everything in and move things through.
And the company that I was working with that became the medical records provider said, do you want a job? Do you want to help us? And so I ended up working behind the scenes as a second job doing a lot of their coding and getting their IT stuff going and being able to go in and train people on how to do this. That’s how I got into the IT realm. Again, I’ve kind of just worked part-time on top of education. I ended up leaving healthcare, moving to corporate education and college level. And I was a director of education and the campus president and did all these kinds of things, but I still worked the IT side. I loved it. And so I just ended up being drawn more to that. So became very fluent in networking. And then I started working for a company on the side again and as their social engineering expert.
So I would go into companies and see if I could break into their businesses just by personable and having conversations. And we started to grow as a team. So there were five of us on the team, internal and external penetration testing and those kind of things. And we would contract out to different businesses. And so I loved it, enjoyed it. And so I’ve continued to work on that team, but my middle school daughter at the time ended up having a really hard time in middle school, just bullied and just a tough run. Middle school’s tough for all kids. And so my job was taking me away way too often and I worked too many hours and my husband and I said, well, what can I do where I can still make an impact, help kids and still work in IT? And I became a high school teacher. So that’s how I got to be where I am.
Steve Bowcut:
There we go. The perfect solution. All right. I love that. Thank you. So did you say you were in the social engineering, you specialized in social engineering in that previous role? I find that fascinating. The audience can’t see you because this is an audio, but you are a very kind trustworthy looking person. So social engineering, you’d be perfect for that.
Tabitha Senty:
That was my thing.
Steve Bowcut:
I would be give my passwords right now.
Tabitha Senty:
And it wasn’t even that. It was more of, hi, I just need to make an appointment to meet with someone and I would just get into the building and as long as I was in, I was able to break that physical barrier and then it would be a lot more. Okay. So the team would come back together at the end and go, okay, how do we help train this company to not allow that to happen again? And so that would be the education side of it.
Steve Bowcut:
Exactly. Okay, thank you. Alright, so let’s talk about the courses that you teach. Maybe you could give us an overview of the curriculum for the networking and cybersecurity course.
Tabitha Senty:
Sure, absolutely. So the course is kind of, I start students in the networking realm because in order to be truly understanding of cyber, you have to understand how a network works and runs, right? So we emphasize hands-on skills within configuring networks. We work with IP addressing network security. We learn to identify a network type. We do topologies and hardware. I make kids even create their own RJ 45 cables because they need to understand how the wiring goes through a cable in order for it to actually work inside of a router or a switch.
We look at network management, we spend time with cybersecurity tools such as firewalls and spend time on VPNs. They learn about TOR browsers, all those kind of things. We spend a lot of time in the OSI model so that they understand that every layer of an OSI model has ports assigned to it so that they know if I’m having an intrusion somewhere, where’s it coming from?
And then we spend a little bit of time in cryptography basics. They work with stake hide programs like that and then network testing. So that’s all the network side. Then we move them into the cyber side and then that they focus on all that knowledge. They can figure out the legal and ethical implications of knowing that and how to get in and out of that and what you’re responsible for, what the laws are. I spend a lot of time on ethics in this class because it’s so easy to do something illegal and unethical without knowing you’re doing it.
So we do spend a lot of time on ethics and then we jump into incident response. So the steps of it. So we deal with detection, containment, eradication, recovery, and because it is a career exploration class, we do a lot of career exploring what’s out there for them. Every class, I mean every degree that you have in this world right now is touched by technology. And so wherever they want to go, we spend time on.
Steve Bowcut:
Okay, excellent. I love that. And I love that idea that it doesn’t matter what your passion is, whatever field you want to go into, they need people with those in that field. So just because you would be a great example, you originally wanted to be in medicine and you found that they needed people with those skills in medicine. So that’s a great example. Now it sounds like from what you’ve told us that it’s all been pretty hands-on. So talk to us about is that important and why is that important for students to have this hands-on experience?
Tabitha Senty:
I think I teach a lot of the way. I learn, I’m very hands-on, easier for me to explain it if I can do it. Hands-on practice transforms their theory into tangible experiences. And if they didn’t have that, they can’t connect the dots. It’s really hard for adults to connect the dots. It’s even harder for students too. If they can’t touch it, they can’t feel it.
So these projects allow students to directly interact with communications and troubleshoot real issues. We do a lot of troubleshooting in here. I’ll tell ’em there’s an error in layer two. Where are we? What’s happening? What do we do? And so they need to figure it out. It deepens their learning, their comprehension allows it. They take abstract theories and they’re able to then break it down into smaller bits and really explain it to somebody else. And that’s huge. They need that though, hands-on practice to be able to do that. If not, there’s no way that they would get it.
Steve Bowcut:
Absolutely right. And that leads into the importance of industry standards. It may be hard for students to understand why that’s so important. So how do you handle that? What standards do you teach them about and how do you help them understand the importance of that?
Tabitha Senty:
Yeah, the technical wording of it is tough for understanding at this age,
Steve Bowcut:
For all of us.
Tabitha Senty:
The concepts, yeah, very true. The concepts aren’t the understanding of how the foundation of an IEE standard works and those kind of things and why we have it, that’s not hard for them to figure out once you start to explain it in a way that makes sense to them. And again, it’s tying that real world scenarios and we talk about, okay, what’s the wireless standards now? Why do we have them? What could a flipper zero do to that wireless standard? Where are we? Those kinds of things.
So if I can bring those things together, they truly understand the standards a little bit better I think, than somebody who never even went to college for it that I haven’t had the real-world application side of it. And it allows them to, I guess, be better with incident responses because they know what they’re working with, why we have what we have and why it’s there. And so as something happens in their world, they can critically think around that and go, oh wait a minute. So this is why we have it and this is what we’re doing with it. So this is how I can apply what I’m thinking, I can apply. And so I think industry standards, it doesn’t matter what age they are, they need to know them. A lot of them, you just have to memorize it’s number. It is what it is for that Cert board, but understanding what the reasoning or the implications of them is really what’s important.
Steve Bowcut:
Excellent, thank you. Let’s talk a little bit about technical skills assessment preparation. Maybe you could share with us your thoughts about that, the importance, and how you handle that.
Tabitha Senty:
So this goes back and forth in the field, A lot of different opinions on technical skills assessment. This is kind of what I tell students, that technical skills assessment sets you apart. You can get a certification and be on the same job hiring status as someone else that doesn’t have that cert. And you’re more apt to be looked at like, yes, I’ll take you because you have the certification. Does it guarantee that the content possibly, does it guarantee you know how to apply the content? No. That’s where the difference comes into play.
So I do teach kids two technical assessments in this classroom. We learn content that would help them prepare for the CompTIA Net+, they learn content that will help them prepare for the CompTIA Sec+, they learn content for the PCCET, which is the Palo Alto Network Certified Technician. Because I use Palo Alto courses in this class a couple of times, it’s really important to know that firewall.
So they’re prepared, but they do have to do work outside. I don’t cover everything. Those are big certs. They have a lot of studying, but I still feel that it’s important for them to sit for a cert board and understand what it feels like. So to be watched while you’re taking that exam to have to make sure you’re patted down, you do fingerprints.
There are a lot of things that go with taking a certification exam that students need to understand that this world is serious and you need to be able to sit down and take that. And so just the concept of taking that type of an exam timed, those kinds of things as well as it sets you apart, it proves to an employer that yes, I know the content. Again, it doesn’t prove that you can do the content, but it does prove that, you know, you took the time, the money, and set aside and studied and did this. It shows dedication to an employer.
Steve Bowcut:
Excellent. Thank you. I appreciate that. So along that same vein, something that I read in the research that I was doing before we started, indicated that your students can get some college credit for the work that they do. How does that work?
Tabitha Senty:
So we have articulated college credit agreements. So that would mean that there are a couple of times a year that we sit down with local community. I articulate with five of them right now. And I sit down with their syllabus, they sit down with my syllabus, we talk about what we teach in the class and we have to align on standards and competencies in order for them to say “yes” your students would be eligible to obtain an articulated college credit from our college upon successful completion.
So we have standards and requirements to complete. So for example, my cyber class is an 80% or higher in skills, technical skills assessment. They also need an 80% or higher in written assessment in order for me to say “yes” you can get that. So I have to do final approval. And so I often take professionalism into that piece too. So if kids aren’t ready for that world, I may say you didn’t quite pass that professional aspect, but those pieces have to fall into place and once they get approval, they are allowed to take that CTE credit transcript and go to that articulated college.
They do have to take one class at that articulated college. And I always tell kids, Hey, you have to take your gen eds, you might as well take an English class online or you might as well take a math class over the summer in order to get that credit. So once they take that one class, they’re enrolled, they’re allowed to, then my class then transfers right to their college transcript and that saves them quite a bit of money. I mean if it’s between three and six credit hours, depending on what school they’re at. And so I’ve just helped them meet their elective standards even if they’re not going into IT.
Steve Bowcut:
Wow, that’s very cool. That is very cool. It gives them kind of a headstart. I think that you are very well-positioned to offer advice to aspiring cybersecurity students. So what advice would you have for a high school student that is interested in or thinks they may be interested in cybersecurity or networking?
Tabitha Senty:
Honestly, no matter what you’re looking at, especially within the cyber field, there’s a couple of things I always say to kids. So the first one would be “be curious, be willing to problem solve”. Cybersecurity and networking are very complex. It’s not very simple. People seem to think things don’t just solve the matrix, right? It’s very complex. So they need to be able to be creative and to not give up, be continuous with your solving of a problem. I do find, and I’m not sure if anybody else is finding this, but I do find nowadays that we give up really quickly because of that scroll world. So our attention span is so short, we tend to give up. Well in cyber, you really have to solve this problem. That’s your job. And then attention to detail. So if you’re looking to get into this field, pay attention to what’s around you, be aware of what you’re doing and if you’re solving a problem, look at all the little pieces of that problem because it only takes one click, right?
It only takes one thing that you’ve missed for it to actually become a huge issue when it could have been pretty small. Ethics and professionalism, that is, again, I said it in earlier, I push ethics in this classroom because this field is so scary in regards to the ethical implications that can happen and legal implications. So I tell students, draw your line in your sand. Never cross it no matter what field you go into, draw your line, be ethically okay in your own world and don’t go beyond it because there is so many things. We have exposure to bank accounts and social security number. There’s a lot of stuff in it that you deal with. And if you don’t draw that line in the sand as ethics, you’re in trouble. And then just be willing to learn.
This field and this industry changes so fast. You have to be a lifelong learner. You don’t just get your degree and you’re done. You literally have to continue, do work with programs like “TryHackMe” or “Hack The Box” and continuously build your skills. My students here just competed in a “Capture The Flag” competition at a high school level and they did amazing, but they learned so many new skills because it was a competition and they were just trying new things. So make sure that you’re willing to learn, that you’re adaptable, and that you can stand strong with your ethics in regards to cyber.
Steve Bowcut:
Very good. Thank you. And maybe we’ve covered this, but I wanted to drill a little bit deeper on this idea of personal and professional growth, kind of what I call the make-your-bed principle. Sometimes an employer is going to hire you for who you are, not necessarily what you know. And so I think it’s really important for young people to begin to develop who they are and to develop, to be the kind of person that can get where they want to go in their career. So can you talk to us about that a little more? Do you feel like we’ve covered it?
Tabitha Senty:
I think again, it’s more of being willing to grow in the uncomfortable situations. So sometimes things are not easy and someone will point out something that’s not “that you didn’t do correct” or “that wasn’t the way they would’ve done it”. And so knowing that their job is to help you grow and not to squash you down, having that mindset will truly help you grow professionally and personally.
And then just know yourself and be comfortable with yourself and own yourself. That in the field will help you from being burnt out. This is a pretty high burnout field because it’s constant. And so knowing you are doing the right thing, you did the best decision that you could do or make at that moment and learn from that, you will go really far in this field. But you really truly have to understand that. And I think that over the years has taken me some time to be like, they’re not coming down on you. They’re just telling you this is the issue, you need to fix it. And so how do you go about fixing it? So it’s not a personal attack, it is more of how do you fix things and that’s what this industry looks at.
Steve Bowcut:
Yep. Very good. That’s very helpful. Alright, couple more questions before I let you go. I did want to talk about opportunities for women in cybersecurity for decades. The industry has been, and I feel like we’re making some positive progress. You can give your opinion on that. But what’s the makeup of your classes or you getting plenty of young women or girls that are interested and or can you do anything to help them understand that this industry needs them as well?
Tabitha Senty:
You’ve hit something that’s pretty passionate to my heart in regards to this industry. There have been many years that even just listening to parents think that their daughters aren’t smart enough for this field, aren’t ready for this, can’t do this type of work, that alone sets the mindset for students right? And so I want to encourage people to just be open-minded in regards to what your son or daughter would like to do for the rest of their lives.
Because in fairness, their perceptions of their child really take a toll on what their children would want to do or can do. So exposing them to a ton of different elements early on in their lives allows them to let their brains work and get to a point where they say, oh, I think I could try this and let ’em try it. So that’s my advice to parents because I see so many days where parents are like, oh no, she’s going to be a doctor. She can’t do that. Well, we’re kind of neurosurgeons of technology.
Steve Bowcut:
There you go.
Tabitha Senty:
In fairness that she would be doing this. So I kind of got off on a tangent for a second. I’ll come back to women in cyber. There are a lot of organizations in Minnesota actually who help push girls in cybersecurity or girls in computer science in general. So we have Girls Who Code, we have NCWIT, which is a National Center for Women in Technology in Minnesota. And we focus really hard on getting females into this field.
And at my high school level here at 196, a couple of students and I, a couple female students about three years ago decided to start a program for middle school girls. It’s called “Girls in Cyber”. And what we do is we put on an event usually about one event a year just because of funding and it’s run by high school girls and they will sit down and work with middle school girls in the entire district on what cryptography is, what password encryption looks like. Sometimes they do big data, they look at data analysis and they don’t realize they’re doing data analysis, but it’s truly data analysis.
And so they run it. It’s usually sponsored by different companies within the metro area. They do donations and we do prizes and I have female guest speakers that come in that have had maybe atypical paths into the world of cyber so that they can see they do belong here. We can get you here. And our district is doing kind of what we call a computer pathways push now. So starting next year, we’re going to try to push that computer science realm from K–12. And so the goal is to see, to give that experience to everyone, not just females, but to intrigue females, to be in the field, to know from an early age, you can do this, you would be really good at this, and you are smart enough for this.
Steve Bowcut:
Perfect. That is so good. I love that. Thank you. We are running short on time, but I do want to finish with kind of a future looking question. If you could maybe share with us what you see the future of cybersecurity education, but do you see any changes coming, things that people in your position maybe need to be aware of so they’re teaching the right things to students?
Tabitha Senty:
If you haven’t seen the world of AI that is coming. And so I just think that teachers and educators just need to be aware that things are changing and we instead of fighting the tools that are available to students, utilize the tools to help students grow. There’s not going to be a world where we walk out of this classroom and not see an AI something, right? So knowing that AI exists, utilizing those tools and truly increasing hands-on skills in a classroom instead of just textbook knowledge will help kids be better overall when they get in the field and not just in IT, in anything.
Application is so important. That was my master’s thesis, is you have to work on applying things in order for it to truly stick in the brain. That hands-on connection is huge. So I think knowing that we’re not walking away from IT anytime soon and providing and supporting kids as they go through the world would be my last bit of advice.
Steve Bowcut:
Okay. Awesome. Thank you so much, Tabitha. Thank you so much for spending some time with us today. I know that it could be a challenge to fit us into your busy schedule, but we really do appreciate that. It’s been a pleasure.
Tabitha Senty:
It’s been a pleasure. Thank you so much.
Steve Bowcut:
You bet. And a big thanks to our listeners for being with us. Please remember to subscribe and review if you find this podcast interesting. And join us next time for another episode of the Cybersecurity Guide Podcast.