Name: Leslie Goloh ‘19
Class Year: 2019
Major: Computer Science
Hometown: Accra, Ghana
Internship Placement: Canaday Library
Job Title: Information Security Program Intern
Location: Bryn Mawr College

What’s happening at your Internship?

As an Information Security Intern, I’ve been working on two different projects where I develop and redesign learning materials for Information Security Practices. This includes tech documentations, videos and Infographics. The clients for the projects are Bryn Mawr’s Institutional Review Board (IRB) and Bryn Mawr’s Information Security Program. Together with my internship partner, I meet with the clients on a biweekly bases to discuss the requirements of the various tools we’ve been working on, and to get feedback from them. I also investigate different software such as Infographic and video makers, to find good ones that have more functionality and can do more work.

While the main work is really to make these tools, there is a research phase to collect all information on the topics. During the biweekly meetings with the clients, we discuss the information and decide on what is necessary for students or faculty to know, and discard the ones that might be overwhelming and not crucial.

Why did you apply for this internship?

I’ve always been interested in cybersecurity as a potential career field. I applied to this internship to learn more about information security and explore the depth of my interest. Additionally, through my experience as a Digital Curriculum Intern with LITS last year, I knew that I would probably be developing learning materials for Bryn Mawr’s Information Security Program. So, I considered this an opportunity to develop and expand my creativity as well as strengthen my digital competencies.

What has been your favorite part of this internship?

My favorite part has definitely been developing Infographics and animated videos! Given the nature of my internship and the overall goal of my projects (which is to educate students on the best Information Security practices), I have spent a significant amount of time brainstorming different ways of presenting information to a student audience. Naturally, it’s exciting to play around with color schemes, animations, effects, pictures etc. But it’s also fun to consider real-world issues that affect the learning experience. This includes accessibility, cognitive load and cultural relevance. In designing these tools, I’ve had to think a lot about these issues and set standard requirements that need to be met for them to be successful. Doing that hasn’t necessarily been easy but it has been fun and fulfilling.

What is something you have learned from your internship that you didn’t expect?

Logistics management is not easy! To be more specific, organizing people, times, and venues for events and projects is not easy. For one of the Information Security Internship (InfoSec) projects, my partner and I needed to include external parties, i.e. other students involved in other internships on campus. Coordinating times for everyone to meet was a bit of a struggle because there weren’t a lot of commonalties. As a result, there was a lot of back and forth emails between us but thankfully, we successfully pulled it off. The real takeaway here is a newfound appreciation for the people working behind the scenes to organize the wonderful events we have here on campus.

Figure 1: Top left: Image of the title of a video on Secure Deletion of Files. Bottom Right: Image of the title of an Infographic on Password Managers.