Degree in applied cyber analytics is helping UTSA build a cyber workforce

OCTOBER 7, 2024 — During an internship with the San Antonio Police Department, UTSA senior Katie Thomas helped a crime analyst find productive ways to gather and filter crime report data. She also assisted with efforts to predict and prevent crimes based on pattern recognition.

Following the internship, she was one of four UTSA students to participate in the National Security Agency’s (NSA) Women Immersed in NSA Cybersecurity event. The professional development opportunity brought together juniors and seniors from renowned cyber and STEM colleges to spend a week at the agency’s Cybersecurity Collaboration Center.

It was an experience that “really solidified the importance of cyber focused careers, especially in defense of our country,” said Thomas, who will be part of the first graduating class to earn UTSA’s B.S. in Applied Cyber Analytics (ACA) in Spring 2025.

Following graduation, Thomas has set her sights on making the future a more secure place. At UTSA, she’s received the education and training she needs to prepare for a career in the growing cybersecurity field.

“Being the only university that offers this degree, UTSA has been the perfect place for me,” Thomas said. “Because of its large cyber focus, there were resources available for me when I needed them, and I have been extremely grateful to all the professors and mentors who have taken the time to sit with me and figure out my future, one step at a time.”

“Being the only university that offers this degree, UTSA has been the perfect place for me.”

UTSA student Katie Thomas participated in a Women Immersed in Cybersecurity (WICYS) event that brought together juniors and seniors from renowned cyber and STEM colleges to spend a week at the NSA’s Cybersecurity Collaboration Center.

The only one of its kind in Texas, the ACA degree combines UTSA’s world-renowned cybersecurity undergraduate degree with the strong offering of data science courses in the Carlos Alvarez College of Business.

The ACA program officially launched in the fall of 2022; twenty-six students are currently enrolled.

The unique program provides students with a conceptual framework, analytical tools and business intelligence skills. It also helps students gain a foundational understanding of cyber security concepts, threats, risks and operations.

“This degree helps fill the gap between producing data and using cyber tools to understand and interpret data, effectively consolidating the two jobs into one,” Thomas said. “I believe the mix of these skills are assets employers look for and will help me find unexplored niche opportunities.”

Information security analyst ranked among the highest in-demand cybersecurity jobs, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which predicted a 33% increase for employment in the cybersecurity field between 2020 and 2030 — much faster than the average job growth.

Nicole Beebe, Melvin Lachman Endowed Chair and professor in the UTSA Department of Information Systems and Cyber Security, said students in the program are acquiring an understanding of the cyber domain, which is “inundated with data and with billions of attempted intrusions worldwide.”

“There is a desperate need for analysts trained in both cybersecurity and data analytics to make sense of cyber data in a descriptive, predictive and detective manner to properly defend, operate, respond to and investigate in their complex cyber environments,” she said. “And that’s the training UTSA students are getting with the degree in Applied Cyber Analytics.”

Beebe is looking for ways to incorporate the use of artificial intelligence, virtual and augmented reality into the program — areas, she says, that are already the focus of groundbreaking research at UTSA.

As the program continues to grow, UTSA students who graduate with the ACA degree will be qualified for a wide range of jobs in all three areas — cybersecurity, data analytics and cyber analytics — as well as non-analytical cybersecurity jobs.

In 2023, there were 2,365 cyberattacks with more than 343 million victims in the U.S. That same year saw a 72% increase in data breaches since 2021, which held the previous all-time record, according to Identity Theft Resource Center’s 2023 Annual Data Breach Report.

Cybersecurity Ventures reports that globally there are about 3.5 million unfilled cybersecurity jobs in 2024, highlighting the critical need for expertise in safeguarding digital assets.

UTSA has been a trailblazer in the fields of AI, cyber, computing and data science. Its School of Data Science, established in 2018, is only school of its kind at a Carnegie R1 U.S. Hispanic Serving Institution. San Pedro I, the downtown San Antonio home for the School of Data Science, now is a hub for more than 1,000 students and researchers.

“Building on our very successful cyber security programs, the ACA program offers a highly integrated curriculum that leverages our faculty expertise in both the cyber and analytics domains and provides our students with a wide range of career choices when they graduate from the program,” said Charles Liu, chair of the UTSA Department of Information Systems and Cyber Security.

“Our students are highly sought-after in the cybersecurity industry and are placed in leading technology firms, Fortune 500 companies, federal agencies such as NSA, DHS, DoD and the U.S. Army,” he said.

— Michelle Gaitan