Community college interns are now paid Homeland Security employees, defending Arizona’s cities, schools and tribal communities from real cyberattacks.
GLENDALE, Ariz. — Imagine graduating into one of the country’s hottest career fields only to be told you don’t have enough experience to get hired.
A new Arizona partnership is trying to solve that problem in an unexpected place: community college.
The Arizona Department of Homeland Security and the Maricopa County Community College District celebrated the grand opening of the Central Regional Security Operations Center, or Central RSOC, at Glendale Community College, formally launching a student-staffed cyber defense hub that officials say is unlike any internship program in the country.
The center puts community college students directly to work as paid AZDOHS employees, monitoring and investigating live cybersecurity threats against Arizona’s cities, counties, school districts, higher education institutions and tribal communities.
“This specific model is incredibly unique,” said Ryan Murray, deputy director of AZDOHS’s statewide cybersecurity office. “A lot of cybersecurity internships and technology internships in general exist, but most of them aren’t getting hands on to real world customer environments. So, where we’re doing something different is we’re actively putting them into real-world scenarios. We’re giving them access to our own customer data, to our own stakeholders.”
Murray said the program was designed to address two problems at once: an immediate shortage of cybersecurity defenders for the state’s smaller governments, and a long-term talent pipeline that gives students a way to break into a field that almost always demands experience they have no way to get.
“Especially in state and local government and a lot of our smaller rural local governments, they just don’t have the talent pools to be able to drive what we need to do to protect from cyber attacks that are occurring every single day,” Murray said. He added that he regularly hears from graduates with two- and four-year degrees who are turned away from cybersecurity jobs for lack of hands-on experience, despite hundreds of thousands of vacancies nationwide.
The internship’s reach across the state’s smaller, resource-strapped jurisdictions, including the tribal communities, reflects that same gap in cyber defense capacity that Murray described, even as students said their daily focus is simply the threats in front of them.
Murray said the center has already produced results: Several interns have been hired into full-time or contractor roles at AZDOHS, and others have moved on to jobs at critical infrastructure organizations and technology companies, all within the program’s first six to eight months of operation.
For the students working inside the RSOC, the appeal is hands-on access and a chance to prove that an internship can mean real responsibility.
Mabel Petkiewicz, a current RSOC intern at GCC, said she came to cybersecurity after years of informal “home labbing” while working in IT. She said the team investigates every threat that crosses its systems, regardless of severity, from malware and adware to phishing and ransomware.
“Although we’re interns, we’re not fetching coffee, you know, and running errands,” Petkiewicz said. “We are doing actual investigative work. We are performing actual analysis on all of the events and, you know, functionally we are security analysts.”
Fellow intern Peyton Sinclair said the realism of the work, including meetings with senior staff, is what separates the RSOC from a typical internship.
“While we are interns by the definition, we are doing professional work and we are inside of a professional environment doing meetings with higher people, and we are gaining experience,” Sinclair said. “While it is an internship, it is a real experience that we are doing.”
Sinclair said the most surprising part of the job has been learning how frequently attacks occur largely unnoticed. “It is actually very, very common to see attacks, threats and all those things happening on computers all over the place just underneath people’s noses,” Sinclair said.
Murray said ransomware remains among the most damaging threats the center has tracked, describing cases in which attackers lock down a victim’s systems and steal data to sell or hold for ransom; attacks, he said, have already hit organizations in Arizona.
“It’s devastating when it happens to a small school district or a small city or county,” Murray said. He said a central goal of the RSOC is to share intelligence on attacks broadly across the state, and the nation, so that information from one incident can help prevent the same attack from succeeding elsewhere.
Because of the sensitivity of the work, Murray said students go through the same vetting as any Homeland Security employee, including background checks and U.S. citizenship verification, under what he called a “zero tolerance policy” for mistakes that could break customer trust.
Even so, he said, the goal is to give students room to grow. “We want them to be creative. We want them to be excited. We want them to innovate,” Murray said, noting interns also get access to sandbox environments to experiment outside live customer systems.
This story is made possible through grant funding from the Arizona Local News Foundation’s Arizona Community Collaborative Fund.
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