The Georgia Institute of Technology announced Thursday it will offer a new online master’s degree in cybersecurity. Georgia Tech offers two other online master’s programs — in Computer Science and Science in Analytics.
Research shows the university’s online Computer Science program helped expand master’s degrees in the field by 8-10 percent. Dr. Raheem Beyah, a professor and executive director of the new program, hopes for similar results, given the nationwide shortage of cybersecurity talent.
“Security is a big problem,” Beyah says. “I tell my students in class, ‘Listen, we’ve all been hacked, just some of us know it and some of us [don’t], and that’s the truth. So, we absolutely need as many cybersecurity experts as possible.”
Students in the program will be able to choose one of three specializations: policy, energy systems, or information security. Beyah says the degree is interdisciplinary, so students will be exposed to each specialty.
“Our energy students will learn a little bit about policy, and our policy students will learn a little about info security, which is important,” he says. “We patterned it after the security problem which is inherently interdisciplinary. We wanted to have a program that matched the current security challenges.”
