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Travelling to another country to pursue an educational opportunity is nothing new for Shahana Fatima (M.A.S. CYF ’25), an international student who came to Illinois Tech from India to earn a master’s degree in cybersecurity.

But she was also offered an opportunity to spend a month in Kosovo in summer 2024 with four of her classmates. There, she helped design and deploy a full cybersecurity infrastructure for Three Folders, a marketing company in Pristina, the capital city of Kosovo.

“It was a big opportunity, going to a different country,” Fatima says. “I would study and work during the week and then explore the country on the weekends.”

The team of five Illinois Tech students were assigned to design and deploy a comprehensive security solution for the Kosovar marketing startup company. The work included building an intruder detection system and a firewall.

“Basically, we worked on the entire cybersecurity structure,” she says. “We looked at how to design the best security solutions we could provide. We were doing a lot of consulting work with the [chief information officer] of the company.”

Among the challenges that Fatima and her teammates faced while in Kosovo included learning to understand the latest technologies that could help them, understanding the law and other legal issues in Kosovo and the European Union, and the ethical issues that the company faced.

“We knew the solutions and how to implement them,” Fatima says. “The trick is how to take those ideas and make them practical to implement.”

Teamwork was a critical element to get the work done.  

The student team was assembled by Illinois Tech Associate Professor of Information Technology and Management Maurice Dawson, and the students, combined, had a wide range of cybersecurity knowledge.

“We divided the work,” she says. “Through teamwork, we were able to figure it out. I relied on my classmates to get the work done. We had people who had knowledge in cyber forensics, digital evidence, and vulnerability and analysis.”

She says the internship in Kosovo is just one of many experiences at Illinois Tech that helped her prepare for a Ph.D. program, where she intends to conduct research in cyber forensics.

Fatima says she has a passion for law enforcement and wants to learn more about how cyber forensics can help her enter the field.

“I have ample information and knowledge that I could easily find a job in cybersecurity, but I like to learn and want to be prepared to enter a cyber forensics career,” she says. “The Kosovo opportunity was an important learning experience. If I didn’t have a solution in a task, I had to find one and then see it implemented.”

Fatima says she enrolled at Illinois Tech because it is one of the few university’s in the United States that offers a cyber forensics program led by faculty who have recently worked in the field or are currently doing so.

“The professors here are exemplary,” she says. “I wanted to study with very experienced professors, and I found that here.”