Former AEOP fellow finding success at Army Cyber Institute

Emily Nack learned to expect the unexpected. It came after enrolling in a class at Rochester Institute of Technology that was merely a graduation requirement, and led to into opportunities that changed her life.

“I took an advanced game design course in my second-to-last semester and ended up in a war-gaming class,” Nack said. “I just thought, ‘let me try it out.’ I didn’t know much about war-gaming and ended up falling in love with it. I became so passionate about it that I ended up taking it twice because I loved the content.”

She was directed by her professor to the Army Cyber Institute at the United States Military Academy, also known as Army West Point that was offering internships through the Army Educational Outreach Program, in an effort to develop a new software that incorporated real world data.

In February, she landed a fulltime job with the institute after partaking in an AEOP apprenticeship and fellowship that gave her the hands-on experience needed to serve as a civilian employee with the Department of Defense.

Nack started as a software engineer and project lead working to turn a tabletop exercise into a digital game that tied in real-world geographic information systems data. The intent was to highlight the interdependencies of critical infrastructure, by modeling a map of the U.S., and using a data-driven back-end to develop a playable product.

After the five-month project, she then began a fellowship that complemented her work as a software engineer, and was tasked with working on the data science and decision team. Shifting gears in her research and work allowed Nack to also dabble in the Internet of Things Research Lab where she deployed various open-source tools and platforms to collect, process, monitor and visualize multimodal data.

Being immersed in a variety of fields that also included cybersecurity, Nack landed a job with ACI as an IT specialist and research lab manager with its four research labs – Internet of Things; Cyber Modeling and Simulation; Cognitive Security Research; and Intelligence Cyber-Systems and Analytics research labs.

“It was a good segue into my current position,” she said about the transition from AEOP to fulltime work. “Despite my title as IT specialist, I still do a lot of the same work in the research labs that I did as an apprentice and as a fellow. One of the great things about working at ACI is the chance to travel, go to conferences, network with people, and take advantage of a lot of great opportunities. There are many resources and people that help make sure you get to where you want to go.”

Administered by RIT's K-12 University Center on behalf of the U.S. Army, AEOP Apprenticeships and Fellowships provide paid, interactive STEM opportunities to high school through postdoctoral individuals with real-world, hands-on innovation and research at Army-sponsored facilities across the country, working alongside some of the world’s best scientists and engineers. There is no commitment to join the military, but provides experiences for civilians in DOD-type settings whose work is equally as important to serving the mission of the military as its uniformed service members.

“I think it was nice to have a support system, so if I ever had questions, I was able to reach out to anyone,” Nack said. “I worked alongside another intern from RIT, and it was nice to be with someone who also worked through the process.”

While taking her career day-by-day, working for the government is something she said she’s invested in.

“I’ve always been interested in working in the public sector; it’s a big reason I got into game design in the first place,” Nack said. “I always saw the industry as something that has such a big outreach and wanted to be able to create something that has the capability to impact the lives of others positively. That’s what drew me to war-gaming and the aspects beyond that to get to where I am today. … When it came to the war-gaming class, I had no idea what it was, and just knew I needed to complete an advanced elective and just went into it with a positive mindset. It turned out to be one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.”

Nack graduated last year from RIT with a degree in game design development and minor in creative writing.