Tyler Morris (2018 graduate) works for Sandia Labs on a variety of cybersecurity projects. His workplace writing also varies a lot-- from informal updates and business correspondence to proposals. He even gets to use his creative writing skills when coming up with fictional security scenarios for trainings and other events. Tyler has fond memories of his Humanities and Communication courses, where he had the freedom to write on almost any topic he was interested in. His advice for current Eagles is to enjoy every opportunity to explore knowledge and experiences outside of your major.
Episode Transcript:
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Abigail:
All right. Hello, everybody and welcome back to another episode of What's the Word Eagle Alumni Spotlights podcasts. I'm your host Abby and today we have a very exciting episode for you. Today we are joined with Tyler and Tyler, why don't you give us a little bit of background about yourself?
Tyler:
Yeah, my name is Tyler Morris. I'm a cybersecurity researcher at Sandia National Laboratories doing various various work in areas like phishing, cyber forensics and simulations, cyber testbed creation stuff like that I attended Embry Riddle I graduated back in 2018 with my cyber intelligence and security degree.
Abigail:
That's awesome. Very nice to meet you, Tyler. And do you have a special memory that you'd like to share with us from your time at Embry Riddle?
Tyler:
You know, that's a hard question. Right? There's there's so many I have a lot of really, really great memories, lots of lifelong friends. Of course, my my wife at Embry Riddle as well, but you know, maybe in the context of the conversation, right? I think, you know, I look back at some of the classes and mandatory courses and things that I took at Embry Riddle, like Dr. Landisgroom, you know, I've really fond memories of going to those classes. And I'll have to admit that when I was looking at scheduling and you know, you're in the middle of school and doing all this stuff, you know, taking a humanities course or comms course doesn't seem very appealing per se. But I have to say that the memories looking back at those classes and going through books like never cry wolf and things like that. I really enjoyed those.
Abigail:
That's awesome. And sounds like you had a very fun experience at Embry Riddle. And now with your job, you said you do work in cybersecurity, do you want to give us a little bit of background about that?
Tyler:
Yeah, like I mentioned, I do a lot of different kind of project development pieces. So some of my focus areas are in enterprise fishing. So help execute Sandy is enterprise fishing program to do cyber forensics simulations. So I was actually out at Embry Riddle recently putting on an event called tracer fire. So that's a lot of fun. I also do some cyber testbed creation type work, building out large test beds and doing the testing and simulation stuff there. So those are just some of the projects there's there's a large breadth I think one of the great parts about working at Sandia is that we get to work on a lot of different projects and a lot of different areas in cyber r&d.
Abigail:
Oh, how fun and sounds like you have a very diverse setting in which you get to work, which always is a very fun thing. And do you get to tie a lot of writing into your work?
Tyler:
Yeah. So I mean, there is right an element of writing, I think in all of it, you know, when I, when I look at the type of writing, it's, it's kind of hard, right? Because we write proposals are of course, doing a lot of business type communications and business writing, right, more conversational, that would be emails, things like that, giving those progress updates. But you know, when I, when I get to work on maybe like a proposal, or particularly for a particular item, we get more into the persuasive type of writing, right, being able to describe our setup and how our particular design is going to be better, right, then maybe others are designing something. But you know, I would say, yeah, a lot of the stuff I do is mostly business, and it's mostly business writing, I do get to do some creative writing, which is great. And that kind of falls into the tracer fire and REO piece. So we get to build out these fictional scenarios for our cybersecurity events, which is a lot of fun. So I actually still get to do that, but not not as much as you know, college.
Abigail:
Oh, right. Right. I gotcha. And now with your writing, do you do a lot of memos? Or is it mostly emails?
Tyler:
Yeah, to some to some level, right. So a lot of, you know, the email conversations are more about updates, and then getting information across to the various stakeholders and things like that, I wouldn't say necessarily write memos to large numbers of people, teams that I helped manage internally have interns and staff members. So, you know, we we typically are more informal on that kind of communication. So we use a platform called mattermost to communicate, so it's more of like, hey, I need quick updates, or, Hey, this is what's going on. I'm not they don't necessarily need to reply for these larger messages. So yeah, you know, again, it's it's much more business like just getting to the point.
Abigail:
All right, I gotcha. Short, sweet to the point, everything good like that. And now have you noticed any big differences between writing you've done at Embry Riddle and writing you're doing in the workplace now?
Tyler:
Yeah, you know, like I said, Embry Riddle, I felt was much more creative, I was able to have more freedom, and deciding what I wanted to write on. Right? You know, we'd read all these different books, and I could kind of take my perspective from that, or maybe I could watch a particular movie or something and write about it for class. So you know, again, it was more creative. And I had the ability to pick a desired topic more than I would at work, right? The workplace, I'm much more focused on that technical side and that business writing so you know, maybe there's a particular type of attack, right, or malware that we want to describe and write up a report on. It's going to be much, much more technical and not as much creative.
Abigail:
All right, that sounds like fun. And now my last question, for you today, do you have any advice for current eagles?
Tyler:
Yeah, you know, I think being able to write effectively and get your point across is such an important skill, right in the workplace, you know, especially now with you know, we're out of the pandemic, but during the pandemic, if you're especially a newer employee, you didn't have these relationships with staff members. It's, it's really hard, right? How do you gauge your communication? How do you you know, how could you make jokes or something like that? It might not come off quite quite right, because you're not there in the in the person context. But you know, I think I think that taking these types of courses at Embry Riddle, like the communications and humanities courses, you shouldn't look at it as a hinderance right or a chore. I think you should look at it as a awesome opportunity to be able to explore topics that you probably at least from an engineering or cyber perspective, you're never going to explore again. And maybe you joined a book club or something like that at work or do that but really, you're not going to have this opportunity to be able to creatively write and talk about topics that are interesting or things you've never even considered before you know I ended up enjoying those classes immensely. I think they provided a lot of great cultural context and myself so you know, definitely try that out and enjoy those courses and have fun with it. I wish also that I had taken creative writing with Dr. Landis room, but I ended up not which you know something I regret.
Abigail:
That is great advice, Tyler and everyone be sure to take those classes you are kind of hesitant about because you never know you may end up loving them. But right now we want to give a big thank you to Tyler for being on our podcast today. That wraps up this week's episode of What's the Word Eagle Alumni Spotlights podcast. We hope you enjoyed this episode and stay tuned for more.
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Amelia:
This podcast is supported by the Department of Humanities and communication at Embry Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Arizona. Abigail Bradbury is our host Matthew Haslam is our department chair. And I'm Amelia Chesley, Assistant Professor of professional writing the intro and outro music is wander by a Lex Find us on Spotify or on YouTube and reach out if you are a Prescott Canvas alum. We'd love to feature you in a future episode.
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