NCC Students Place in SkillsUSA Competition

Updated from original story

Four students from Northampton Community College (NCC) competed in the District 11 SkillsUSA competition on January 24 in Allentown. Sebastian Babon and Fred Jarder, information security students, competed as a team in the cybersecurity category. Maria Dos Santos, computer information systems student, and Mason Bennett, computer science student, competed as a team in the Web Design category. Brian Stokes, NCC computer science professor, was the faculty advisor. 

Both NCC teams took home first place in their respective categories at districts, and they advanced to the Pennsylvania state competition in Hershey, April 3-5, where Babon and Jarder placed first. The NCC cybersecurity team will be heading to Atlanta, Georgia in June for the national competition.

“We looked into doing some testing and some labs, looking over some vulnerable machines,” said Jarder in a WFMZ interview. Check out that coverage of the event here. 

High school, technical school and college students participated in the competition in many fields, such as construction, plumbing, automotive, cosmetology, information technology, web design, programming, and more. The Cybersecurity teams had a series of challenges related to industry standard certifications, like the Security+ and Certified Ethical Hacker exams. The web design teams had to create a working web page with a specific number of pages and attributes. 

“We competed this year because Fred and Sebastian had competed when they were at MCTI, and they wanted to continue that. We reached out to clubs and areas of study at NCC, and we had Mason and Maria join us to compete. The plan is to compete again next year with (hopefully) a larger group of students,” said Stokes. 

SkillsUSA is a nationally recognized series of competition events in which students of many disciplines demonstrate what they have learned through their educational experiences, allowing them to discover what more they may need to know going forward. The competitions give students opportunities to test their knowledge in real-life, practical settings, providing valuable experiences they can learn from as they continue pursuing their educational and professional goals.