Tracking Down Lucrative Careers:
Investigating Criminal Justice and IT Means Success for Students
Any student with an interest in technology and criminal justice can see a career path stretching off into the future. The evening news programs breathlessly cover intelligence coups like tracking down the London terrorists or arresting major figures in al-Qaeda, while also warning viewers not to be victimized by cybercrimes such as identity theft, credit card scams, and computer fraud.
Juniata recognized this trend early and established a criminal justice Program of Emphasis (POE) in 1997, and the program has grown every year. According to Lizabeth Wiinamaki, associate professor of criminal justice and social work, who has headed the criminal justice program since its inception, the post-September 11 world has resulted in an increasing need for college graduates for homeland security agencies, local and federal law enforcement agencies, and corporate security positions.
Wiinamaki, who is currently on sabbatical, also recognized that criminal justice graduates must be intimately familiar with technology issues and established an interdisciplinary program with Juniata's information technology department almost as soon as the new program was added to the College curriculum. "The interdisciplinary program makes our graduates stand out, giving them great marketing advantages in very competitive job markets," Wiinamaki said in an e-mail interview.
"If you look at law enforcement today, it's an entirely new model," explains Bill Thomas, associate professor of information technology. "You don't need people kicking in doors anymore, you need a team backed up by five or six analysts."
"Where I work we are hiring people at a high rate— 60 people a week," says Adam Mayer '05, who works as a computer analyst for security issues at a Department of Defense agency. "I see that, post-September 11, this field is growing faster than other areas of information technology."
Criminal Justice is becoming one of the College's growing programs, attracting 56 students who have declared the program as a POE and eight students who have incorporated the curriculum as a minor. According to Terri Bollman-Dalansky, director of admissions, the number of students who apply to enroll as criminal justice majors doubled from 2004 to 2005.
Most criminal justice students combine an information technology secondary emphasis into their POE. Students also have combined the POE with secondary emphases in psychology, chemistry, and biology. psychology, chemistry, and biology.
Thomas and Wiinamaki both agree that the criminal justice information technology link was strengthened when Wiinamaki forged an agreement with i2inc., the software developer who created Analyst's Notebook, a visual investigation analysis package. A short list of i2inc.'s clients include the FBI, the National Security Agency, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the U.S. Customs Service, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and the Central Intelligence Agency.
Juniata was the sixth collegiate partner for the software firm. Described as data visualization and investigative analysis software, Analyst's Notebook is able to collate and analyze huge amounts of raw information in a variety of formats and allow its users to create easily understood charts that can reveal links between individual relationships, chronological relationships, and a variety of other data.
In Juniata's course, students are required to make two presentations using the software to track a process or network. "Presentation skills are critical to making a case in court," Thomas explains.
Rebecca Jankowski '06, a senior from State College, has found that Analyst's Notebook training makes her immediately marketable. This summer she worked as an intern in the Pennsylvania Department of State's Bureau of Charitable Organizations. As part of the agency's investigative unit, Jankowski created two charts: one for a charity embezzlement case in Wilkes Barre, Pa. and another that traced a charity case in Wilkes Barre, Pa. and another that traced a charity seeking registration in Pennsylvania that might have had ties to terrorist organizations.
"When I left the internship, the investigators actually asked me if they could call if they had any Analyst's Notebook questions," she says with a laugh.
Thomas says the training in Analyst's Notebook makes Juniata graduates particularly marketable, because IT curriculum at larger institutions has been slower to incorporate courses using the software. Thomas attended a conference centered on the software program and saw representatives from nearly every federal agency, the insurance industry, the banking industry, and many corporate companies. "The next step in the business world is e-commerce and for that business to grow companies have to have security in place to make customers feel safe using it," he says. "Criminal justice and IT graduates are seeing these jobs grow exponentially."
Thomas says the program also is considering another interdisciplinary course, forensic accounting, in collaboration with the business department. "The majority of white-collar crimes are revealed by accounting audit," he says. "And 70 percent of computer crimes occur in-house."
In order to give students more training in these areas, the IT department has several projects on the drawing board and hopes to implement them in the next year or two. One idea is a Computer Security Response Team, a student-led working group tasked with solving security issues and attacks on campus computers. Thomas also envisions a Computer Security Engineering course and a Computer Forensics course, where students would learn to retrieve and recover data using methods that are admissible in courts of law.
"I think Juniata has been able to offer new courses like Analyst's Notebook and upgrade technology much faster than other colleges," says Jankowski. "I can see students are coming to Juniata just because of this program, and the classes are getting bigger every year."