First year EIE undergraduate student Sourish Sharma assembled an interdisciplinary team to reach the semifinals of a national competition.
Thank you Sourish, for sharing your journey.
“I’ve always had an interest in cybersecurity and hacking, which led me to attend the BSides security conference, and at one of the stalls there, I met someone who talked about his mission to inspire the younger generation, and he encouraged me to sign up to the Cyber Leaders Challenge. So, I formed a team and we submitted our application.
For the next round, we all went to Cheltenham to compete in-person. It was a fantastic day trip, where we had to brief a mock local council of decision makers on a fictional cybersecurity incident. We had spent a few weeks preparing, but it mostly all came down to the final 48 hours!
We submitted our briefing note with one minute to spare! Despite our super shoddy presentation (my notes were all digital, but we weren’t allowed phones!), we progressed to the next round – probably because of the way we structured our response and represented information in our handout. The judges seemed impressed with our method of communication, even if our public speaking skills had some way to go.
“Teamwork, determination and passion”
The next round was much the same process. This time, it was held in BT Tower, London. Our team was very multi-disciplinary – we had an Imperial Maths student (Adi), an Imperial Mechanical Engineering student (Kuan), a Computer Engineering student (Ivan, from the University of Birmingham), and an EIE student (me). This probably helped us do so well, despite being relatively inexperienced – we were the only first-year team!
We attacked the problem from multiple points and put together a concise briefing for the mock government officials. There was lots of arguing during the quarter-finals, but ultimately we had to disagree and commit.
Fortunately, this worked out well. We somehow progressed from the quarter-finals to the semis (top 10 of 65). This time, we didn’t have a month to prepare – we just had overnight! Fuelled by lots of coffee and Red Bull, we managed to get a solid script done in time for the next day, though a couple of us were barely functioning with such little sleep.
Unfortunately, we didn’t get through to the very finals, but we did hang around to see the finals live. We took away some important lessons from the judges’ feedback and the live finals, and look forward to out-doing ourselves next year”
Mentors and memories
“Throughout, my tutor, EEE’s Dr Elina Spyrou was a fantastic mentor. She brought yet another perspective to each of the three problems, and made interesting points each time. Elina was really invested into the competition and our success, ensuring to come to the semi-finals to see our performance! She brought joy to every interaction and took us all out on a celebratory/good luck dinner the night before the finals!
We were also extremely busy during each stage. The initial application was done last-minute, and a couple of us were on holiday! The next round came after IC Hack, which was super tiring. The quarter and semi-finals were in the same week as a couple of our big course exams, orals, and coursework submissions! Juggling all of these things together was near-impossible, but simply by trying harder and putting more grit into it, we managed.
Over the competition, we met many amazing students who will remain lifelong friends. We had the opportunity to learn loads about the cyber industry, which showed me a whole new part of it that I never considered before.
The views from the top of the BT Tower, both during the day but especially at night were phenomenal and an experience we won’t forget 🙂 “
Sourish’s top take-aways from the experience
- Even first-year students are able to achieve things; there’s no need to wait 1, 2 or 3 years before entering competitions and working on projects.
- It really highlights the power of a multi-disciplinary team and meeting people outside your own course.
- There’s great value in going to industry conferences and networking with others.
- It was a great opportunity to demonstrate our passion and drive, especially given that we had lots of exams to juggle during the finals.