At the John Stuart Mill College there are myriad ways of further enriching your education, be it by joining the honours programme, by taking extracurricular courses or by simply attending one of the frequently held guest lectures. The PPE programme however also equips students with the tools to successfully undertake their own extra-extracurricular educational adventures. Which is exactly what a group of four second year PPE students recently did.
Earlier this year PPE students David Alders, Laura Büttner, Tara Kobetič and Javier Ripa entered the Cyber 9/12 Strategy Challenge, a cyber policy and strategy competition developed by the Geneva Center for Security Policy and the Atlantic Council. University students from around the globe produced policy recommendations to solve a fictional cyber catastrophe. In this competition, the team, aptly named the Cyber Punks, competed against students from bachelor’s, master’s and even PhD programmes related to cyber security. Without being cyber experts and without having had any courses on cyber security, the team managed to get selected from hundreds of applicants for the final round of twenty-eight teams. The Cyber Punks were awarded the ‘most creative policy proposal’ prize for their work. How did they manage to do this?
At PPE, every third period one of the so-called PiP courses is taught. These PPE in Practice courses essentially are condensed master classes in the art of policy recommendation. During PiP, a group of four PPE students chooses a policy problem, which is then thoroughly analysed over three weeks. The groups are then invited to give a presentation and hand in a policy paper directed to their fictional client (such as a government agency). With three PiP’s under their belt, the students were well-equipped to tackle the Cyber 9/12 Challenge, which also involved giving a presentation in front of a diverse jury comprising internationally recognized experts in the international security field and writing a policy brief.
Though that’s not all. Aside from policy recommendation skills the JSM College also provided the Cyber Punks with valuable contacts, in this case PhD Fellow and Junior Lecturer Maria-Alexandra (Alex) Martin, who offered the group intense support and guidance during the challenge. Alex, who did have previous knowledge about cyber security and connections to people working in the international security field, devoted her own free time to set up a study schedule for the team to quickly gain knowledge about cyber security and related topics, while also meeting with the students every other day during the preparation period to make sure the process was coming along expeditiously. At the start of the challenge she told the team: “I am very excited to be working with you on this, but I want you to know it will be tough, yet fun, and I want your full commitment for the next 3 weeks.”
Full commitment is what the Cyber Punks gave, resulting in them handing in a policy brief on the challenge’s fictional problem and three policy proposals to solve it. Their final recommendation was their third policy proposal: a private sector initiative wherein a joint venture fund is created by the EU nations to bolster the European cybersecurity sector in in order to prevent future catastrophes. The initiative manages to reach all four policy goals the team set, including damage control, better public-private relationships, a resilient and future-ready CNI (critical network infrastructure) and even environmental considerations. Besides offering a solution to the challenge’s problem, the team’s proposal also neatly ties the P, P and E aspects of PPE together as the obviously economic and political dimensions of a joint venture fund also contains many normative (philosophical) considerations. This was also the reason that the Cyber Punks got awarded the ‘most creative policy’ prize, as other teams from different educational backgrounds used much more focused lenses instead of the interdisciplinary view the second years brought from PPE.
Being awarded the ‘Most Creative Policy Proposal’ was a very impressive accomplishment for the Cyber Punks. In Alex’ words: “A big shout out to the team for managing such a performance in such a short amount of time and of course without being cyber experts or having advanced courses on cyber security related matters. I think this speaks highly of our student cohort and the quality of the PPE program.”