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Day 5 Recap: RSAC College Day, (Girl) Scouting for Talent, Tina Fey, and Looking Ahead

by RSAC Editorial Team on March 8, 2019

Wow, what a week! Across the past five days we saw more than 42,500 attendees, 740 speakers, 700 exhibitors, 31 keynotes and 783 sessions. Conversations were as complex and diverse as the challenges we face in cybersecurity: from solving the talent shortage, how to combat stress/burnout, and the emerging field of public interest technology, to exploring deep technical subjects like emerging attack techniques, threat hunting, and DevSecOps.

Our stages and classrooms featured a wide range of voices from across the globe and across industries. Some were RSAC veterans, but we had plenty of newcomers too. We also saw a 16-year old cybersecurity CEO, Kyla Guru, take the West keynote stage in a brilliant, inspiring talk aimed at enabling the next generation of cybersecurity talent. And don’t forget about Helen Mirren!

Thought it’s a bittersweet feeling to be at the end, we hope you came away from Conference challenged, inspired and motivated to make cybersecurity and our world BETTER.

Before we look ahead to what’s next on the RSAC agenda, let’s look back at the fifth and final day of RSAC USA 2019:

The extended RSAC College Day wrappedup today. Current students and recent graduates were exposed to a range of programming that helped them explore career options and network with companies eager to hire young cybersecurity professionals. Thursday’s breakfast session saw some great questions from students around how to present themselves to companies, what those companies are looking for, and how to best approach them. Yesterday’s open house had great attendance, with every sponsor receiving tons of resumes from student candidates. And today’s Job Search 2019 session opened with a discussion around owning your own narrative – including how to understand your audience and how to present to them – while the Resume Tips and Review session spoke with HR reps about how to strengthen their resumes.

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In her keynote (Girl) Scouting for Talent: The Solution in the Next Generation, Sylvia Acevedo, CEO of Girl Scouts of the USA, spoke about her experiences in the public and private sectors, and all of the great work the Girl Scouts are doing to educate girls on STEM and prepare them for careers in those fields. Acevedo noted that half of elected women in the U.S. are Girl Scouts alumni and the group currently offers 122 STEM badges (with 51 more coming soon).

“We don’t want girls to just be users of tech, we want them to be designers and inventors of it too,” she said. “The world is being redesigned around data — code by code, line by line — to create the world around us. We need men and women coding the world the way we want.”

Following Acevedo’s keynote in Moscone South was Engineering Trust and Security in the Cloud Era, Based on Early Lessons, during which Quentin Hardy (former New York Times editor and current head of editorial at Google Cloud) moderated a panel of fellow Googlers who discussed trust in the cloud era and how we can build clouds securely from the ground up.

Today closed out with a bang, as RSAC program chair and CTO of Symantec Hugh Thompson interviewed actress, producer and multi-talented star Tina Fey. The wide-ranging conversation, given to a full audience, featured Fey’s unique blend of humor, wit, insight and perception.

Looking Ahead

That’s a wrap for this year’s Conference! We hope you found it as engaging and inspiring as we did.

Remember that even though it’s over, RSAC onDemand will continue to host some of the best content from this year’s Conference so you’re able to watch (or re-watch) sessions, keynotes, and presentations whenever you want. You can also catch the Conference action and relive some highlight moments on YouTube and Flickr.

And our Conference Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram pages are great resources for information, connection and updates all year long.

RSA Conference 2019 Asia Pacific & Japan takes place July 16-18, 2019 in Singapore, and we hope you join us next year in San Francisco from February 24-28 for RSA Conference USA 2020. Mark your calendars!

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