Kaia Ecklund, originally from Morton, Washington, moved to Great Falls and started attending Great Falls College after high school and a couple gap year. He shares his experience pursuing degrees in both cybersecurity and computer programming.
How are campus support systems?
There are some amazing support systems. You can easily find free tutoring at the college. Having most of your professors on campus is nice. We have a great library with a lot of resources, and just in general a great atmosphere. Everyone’s willing to help you figure out whatever you need help with.
What’s it like to be a student here?
There’s a lot of stuff to do, which is nice. I am a part of student government. I am on the Curriculum Council, and I’m part of Phi Theta Kappa, the honor society.
Outside of school, do you work?
I am a real estate agent, licensed in both Montana and Washington. I’ve been doing less of the real estate while I’ve been in school because I’ve been busy.
What are your short and long-term goals?
I’ll be wrapping up the cybersecurity part of it (this year), and then I’ll start the programing part of it. I’d like eventually get into either IT or computer programing.
If I could find a computer-related job in Great Falls… it’s one of my favorite places I’ve ever been, that would be my long-term goal.
How are your instructors?
I think you get a great education at a two-year institution. The only difference is cost. And a two-year college is way more affordable. Every instructor has been amazing here.
You did something pretty cool this summer, right?
I applied to the Montana Space Grant Consortium (MSGC) to work on a drone program that’s in Missoula (at the University of Montana). I wanted to be able to continue learning through the summer. Thankfully, this internship had housing available, so I was able to stay on campus. Since this was a paid internship, I could go do the internship and not worry about the financial side of it.
What did you do?
You could kind of choose where you spent your time. We all kind of worked on our own projects, but then we’d come together (to work) on different projects.
** The interns worked on larger research projects with their mentors, including a vegetation study on ranches around Montana, and water temperatures on a local river. Visit the link in the comments to read more about the drone research projects**
What was your individual project; how/why did you choose it?
Drone detection. I thought it sounded interesting.
Drones are becoming way more prevalent. If you have an event or something like that, you want to be able to detect whether a drone is coming in or not. It’s a security thing.
The idea behind the project was seeing if I could create something that could detect drones, that’s affordable. It was kind of obvious early on that I wouldn’t get too far into the project just because there was not a lot of time, and we had a lot of projects going on.
You’re continuing with your project, right?
I applied for an apprenticeship where I could continue working on this project this semester. It’s the hope that by the end of this apprenticeship, I’ll have a working system that will at least accomplish some of the goals.
You got licensed too, right?
Yeah, now I have my commercial drone license, so I can actually fly drones for commercial purposes.
How was this entire experience?
There’s parts of me that are like kind of freaking out where I think I’m going to fail. But it’s also been a great experience. It’s nice to be able to use some of these technologies and have a research project that I never would have even thought about before this internship. I’d say after this internship, I’m definitely more confident that I will be aiming for a tech-related job of some sort.