From First-Generation Student to Cybersecurity Researcher

Elliot Glenn grew up in Echo, Oregon, a town so small, she jokes, “You don’t usually have to go through it.” Today she’s a junior computer science major landing nationally competitive internships, publishing original cybersecurity research, and doing it all without a single student loan. 

The first time Elliot touched a line of code, she was in seventh grade. Her school had secured one year of funding for a robotics program, and something clicked immediately. “I really fell in love with it,” she says. “I remember trying to help all the other teams figure out how to use it.” That single year of programming planted a seed that would carry her through online high school courses, a college preview day in Ashland, and ultimately to SOU.

Her reasons for choosing SOU were equally practical and personal including the small class sizes and the beauty of the Rogue Valley, which was as far from Eastern Oregon as she could get while still staying in-state. At an SOU preview day, a computer science student presented about the major. “From what they were talking about, the major seemed really cool,” Elliot recalls. “I really liked the professors.” That instinct turned out to be right.

“SOU has all the opportunities for you. You just need to know how to take them.”

— Elliot Glenn, Junior, Computer Science

A First-Generation Journey

Elliot is the first in her family to attend college. For a long time, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to go at all, not because of lack of ability, but lack of resources. “I didn’t really have any financial support from my family,” she says. “Honestly, for a long time, I didn’t think I was going to be able to go to college because we didn’t have the money for it.” Scholarships changed everything allowing her to focus entirely on her studies.

A Freshman Who Didn’t Know She Was Ready

Elliot arrived at SOU and enrolled in the Bridge Program—designed for Oregon students who may not have access to college preparation. The program let her move in a few weeks early, meet older students, and get her bearings before classes began. “I come from such a small town,” she says. “Leaving home for the first time was a big deal. Being shown around by students who’d been here for a while, that was really helpful.”

Within weeks of arriving, she landed a job with SOU’s IT department, where she’s now a support technician. She fixes computers, re-images machines, troubleshoots hardware issues, and has a hand in nearly every piece of technology on campus. It’s real-world experience that complements what she learns in class.

Two Summers of Real Research

What sets SOU’s computer science program apart, and what’s shaped Elliot’s trajectory, is the Summer Research Experience (STEM REx), which pairs undergraduates directly with faculty mentors for original research projects. 

As a freshman, she worked with Dr. Daniel DeFreez on a project that turned out to be genuinely fun: programming AI language model agents to play Dungeons & Dragons. “We’re both into D&D,” Elliot laughs. The project explored how AI agents could simulate social interactions using Foundry, a game platform with programmable modules. “We got some good results,” she says, “and they took the work we did and continued it with other students and other projects.” Her freshman-year research became a seed for future scholarship.

“Being able to work so closely with faculty mentors really helped me figure out my path forward.”

— Elliot, on the Summer STEM Research Experience

Her sophomore summer research, with Dr. David Pouliot, pointed her toward the future she’s now building. Together they created what they called a “Dynamically Generated Web Security Playground,” an intentionally vulnerable website generator that recreates itself differently each time it runs, giving students a safe environment to practice finding and exploiting security flaws. “It’s kind of challenging to intentionally build something to be broken,” Elliot admits, “because a lot of frameworks now prevent certain things because of vulnerabilities. I had to find ways to work around that.” That challenge, and the mentorship of Dr. Pouliot, crystallized her direction. She’s now completing SOU’s cybersecurity certificate alongside her Bachelor of Science.

The Opportunity That Changed Everything

This past spring, Elliot applied to what felt like a daunting number of internships and research programs. Her CS faculty, who maintain a dedicated Slack channel to share opportunities with students, sent along a listing for something called the STEP program with ACCESS Operations, an NSF-funded national organization that connects computing researchers with high-performance computing infrastructure like supercomputers.

She also got accepted to a research program at USC. Then the STEP offer came in, and it wasn’t a hard choice. The program has three tracks: networking, software engineering, and cybersecurity. She was placed directly into the cybersecurity cohort. This summer, she’ll spend two weeks in Miami for orientation and onboarding, then travel to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to work with a team on securing high-performance computing systems, all with travel, housing, food, and a stipend covered by the program. After the summer, she hopes to continue remotely with the organization while finishing her final year at SOU.

“For a long time, I didn’t think I was going to be able to go to college. Scholarships genuinely helped so much. I haven’t had to take out any loans at all.”

— Elliot

Faculty Who Open Doors

Ask Elliot about her experience at SOU and she keeps returning to one thing: the faculty. Professor Bernie Bosco helped her refine her resume and navigate the application process. Dr. Boscoe also brought her along to a conference in Virginia focused on machine learning and AI, an experience that gave her a window into what academic research actually looks like. “Coming there as a student was really great,” she says, “to see what it would take to go into research.”

Now she’s also developing software with one of her professors: a Capture the Flag cybersecurity challenge platform built specifically for SOU students to sharpen their skills. It’s her fourth distinct technical project at the university.

“Every faculty member in the CS department has provided me with some really awesome opportunities,” she says. At a larger institution, Elliot might have been one face among hundreds in an introductory lecture. At SOU, she has professors who know her name, send her job listings, invite her to conferences, and build research projects alongside her.

Looking Forward

Elliot will graduate in spring 2027 with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, a cybersecurity certificate, and a full experiential résumé that will gain her access in the field. She’s eyeing the West Coast for work but says she’ll go wherever the right opportunity takes her. Graduate school isn’t off the table, but for now, she’s eager to get into the industry.

When asked to describe SOU to someone who’s never heard of it, she doesn’t hesitate: “It has all the opportunities for you. You just need to know how to take them.”

Help the Next SOU Student Find Their Path

Your gift to SOU supports first-generation students, faculty-led research experiences, and the scholarships that make college possible for students who never thought it could be.

Give today.