Kaya Sol became a Cybersecurity Research Fellow after taking a course with Assistant Teaching Professor Jessica Beyer, a lead faculty member of the Jackson School’s Cybersecurity Initiative. The course was Sol’s “first exposure” to the cyber world and its oceans of information. She began to learn more about the intersections between cybersecurity and business, which intrigued her as a student majoring in Operations and Supply Chain Management.
After dipping her toes in the waters of international relations topics, Sol applied for Beyer’s Advanced Cybersecurity Research seminar. Despite being new to the scene, Sol was up for the challenge. Becoming a research fellow launched her headfirst into the tides of current technology questions and issues.
“Cyber touches everything … basically any topic you’re interested in, there’s some aspect of it where cyber is involved,” Sol, who earned a bachelor’s in Business Administration in 2024, said.
Cybersecurity fellows independently research topics they find most engaging; for Sol, the program was a rigorous exercise that helped build her research and paper writing skills. She recalls scrapping 30-page drafts and starting over, and over, during her project on international collaboration in cybersecurity.
“I used [my project] as my samples for when I was applying to graduate school,” Sol, now a second-year graduate student at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), said. At SAIS, she continues engaging with cybersecurity strategy and tech policy at the national level. “It’s a fun time to be in it, but also a chaotic time,” she added.
And for those who are considering becoming cybersecurity fellows? Sol’s recommendations are clear.
“Just take that leap, pursue it … do the program, try it,” she said. “You can go as technical as you want or as high level as you want, and you can choose any subject in the world and connect it to cyber in some way, and it’s going to be useful, it’s going to be interesting, it’s going to be exciting, and it should be.”
Rebooting community through cybersecurity
At its heart, the Jackson School’s Cybersecurity Initiative is more than a program — it’s a community. From the get-go, the program builds a sense of community that carries students through their time at the University of Washington and well into their professional lives.
“My hope for all the students … is that they will gain a feeling of community or camaraderie,” Beyer said, adding that “I have this image in my mind, like holding hands out into space.”
That connection doesn’t end after graduation. When Beyer and Associate Professor Stephen Meyers traveled to Washington D.C. last spring with students, they met with alumni from the initiative working across government and policy sectors.
Beyer said. “We did have an alumni event and there were a ton of my former students there and … they then got to connect with the students on the trip.”
For Beyer, maintaining these networks is about helping students feel grounded in something larger than themselves.
“UW is so big, it can be hard to feel like you’re part of a community,” she said. “So I’m always trying to think of how we can help people feel like they’re not just sort of being ejected out into the postgraduate world, but rather that there’s still that community out there that they can draw on, whether it leads to anything or not.”
That philosophy has taken root among students and alumni alike. “It’s a really great community,” Vanessa Pankaj, a former fellow who graduated with a bachelor’s in international studies in 2025, said. “I think Dr. Beyer built [it] by encouraging us all to talk to each other and share our experiences in class. It definitely carries over post-grad — we’re all in communication and actively talk at least a couple times a week.”
The result is a living network, and one that grows stronger every year.
“Writing, communication, and community in general are the three takeaways I’d put down as what I learned from the Cybersecurity Research Fellowship,” Pankaj said.
Applications to join the Cybersecurity Research Fellows in spring quarter 2026 are open until week three of winter quarter 2026. For more information about how to apply, visit the Jackson School website. To learn more about the program, email Jessica Beyer at jlbeyer@uw.edu.
