The inaugural cohort of the Master of Information and Cybersecurity (MICS) program began classes on May 7, 2018. The first class is comprised of 14 enterprising students, including a Technical Counterintelligence Special Agent in the Army, a Chief Technical Risk Officer at Kaiser, a Senior Security Reporter, and a UC Berkeley IT Systems Lead.
The foundational MICS courses include Beyond the Code: Cybersecurity in Context, with Adjunct Professor Chris Hoofnagle, which explores the most important elements beyond technology (including ethical, legal, and economic frameworks) that shape the playing field on which cybersecurity problems emerge and are managed, and Cryptography for Cyber and Network Security, with Professor Doug Tygar, which is focused on both the mathematical and practical foundations of cryptography.
The MICS program starts three times throughout the year (January, May, and September), and applications are reviewed as they are received. The final application deadline for the September 2018 cohort is June 6, 2018.
What is Cybersecurity?
Cybersecurity comprises a set of technologies and practices that ensure the availability, integrity, and confidentiality of information percolating through digital systems, networks, devices, and sensors. And, yet, this rough definition of cybersecurity is already insufficient, because digital technologies are themselves rapidly evolving, reshaping human experience and understanding, and generating complexity and effects that extend beyond what humans can reasonably know or manage. These dynamics make cybersecurity one of the most professionally important and intellectually interesting domains – a true, twenty-first-century master problem.
Cybersecurity at Berkeley
The MICS program was designed from the ground up to meet this emerging set of cybersecurity challenges. At the School of Information, we believe the next generation of cybersecurity professionals will need technical capabilities as well as a deep contextual understanding of the ways in which digital insecurities shape societies, organizations, and individuals.
Cybersecurity professionals can make the greatest impact at the intersection of these domains; the I School also sits intellectually at this intersection. Our community includes teachers, researchers, and practitioners who bring together the ethical, social, political, economic, legal, military, and technical components of cybersecurity, so that we can equip graduates to become leaders in the field, whether they wish to lead in the private, public, or philanthropic sector.
There is no static set of capabilities will ensure the career success of a cybersecurity professional. The MICS program is designed to develop students’ capacity to master the concepts, skills, toolsets, and insights needed to fuel a long and dynamic cybersecurity career.
