Intro to Cybersecurity Course Gives Gateway Students Exposure to a Growing Career Field
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GATEWAY SCHOOL DISTRICT
Before Joshua Fry even entered high school, he knew he wanted to get into the cybersecurity field. The son of a cybersecurity specialist, Fry, a junior at Gateway High School, was exposed to the field from an early age.
When Fry learned that his school would be offering an Introduction to Cybersecurity course, he was thrilled.
“ I’ ve known that I’ ve wanted to do cybersecurity for the last four years of my life. When I found out that Gateway was going to offer a cybersecurity class, I was really excited,” said Fry.
“ It’ s definitely a growing field. I have friends who want to go into similar things, like a help desk position or software engineering.”
“ I’ ve been interested in technology my entire life. I taught myself how to code, I’ m a part of the robotics team here, and I’ ve done a lot of summer programs involving information science,” added Baylee Blanton, a senior.“ When I heard about this class, I was really excited.”
As the job market and world adapts to a technologydriven generation, more and more students are becoming like Fry and Blanton. An analysis in June 2025 by CyberSeek, a cybersecurity workforce insights company, found that“ private and public sectors deployed 514,359 job listings over the past 12 months in recruiting for dedicated cybersecurity jobs and adjacent technical positions with a heavy cybersecurity skills requirement. This represents an increase of nearly 57,000 listings, or 12 %.”
A career-focused, evolving district, Gateway added Introduction to Cybersecurity 1A and 1B for this school year. The course, taught by Tyler Perhac, dives into careers in the field, and introduces students to phishing and spam,
28 MONROEVILLE coding, encrypting, SQL programming, and database management, among other subjects.
“ The goal is to give a broad overview to build some more interest and build these classes further to get students certifications and help them build a portfolio,” said Perhac.
“ We already have more students asking about next steps for the next semester. I definitely see interest growing and we want to build it into a program as much as we can. We’ re building a logo for the program and working on t-shirts. We’ re trying to raise awareness about this class and the cybersecurity field. We want to build this as another career pathway for students.”
In the early days of the class, interest has already grown. An initial activity introduced students to the wide variety of careers offered in the cybersecurity field. Even a seasoned, technology-adept student like Blanton said she was surprised to learn about the opportunities that were available.
“ We went through careers in cybersecurity, and the feedback I got from students is that they didn’ t realize how many pathways and fields there were in cybersecurity. There’ s a lot of different types of jobs,” Perhac said.
“ I definitely think with how technology driven this generation is, it’ s something they enjoy and something that comes naturally for them. With how much technology changes and is part of their lives, I think it’ s going to grow.”
Perhac structures much of the class around student-led activities that revolve around problem-solving. Capture the flag assignments, which task students with finding text strings or‘ flags’ that are hidden within programs or websites, are common within the class. The activity