On Friday, December 8th 2023 the Cyber Patriot team consisting of Isaac Trost, Srikar Rallapalli, Mason Melaragno, Keegan Vilushis, Arpan Uprety, and Westin Kilgas returned to Gannon’s I-HACK building for the Cyber Patriot States Competition.
The exceptional scoring in the rounds leading up to this placed the team in the Gold Tier (there are 3 tiers: Silver, Gold, and Platinum). This tier/round was much more difficult than the previous 2 rounds. This time there were 3 images to work on (Windows Server 2022, Windows 10, and Ubuntu 20). There was also a cisco quiz and packet tracer activity.
Given our previous experience with scoring larger chunks of points early on, this competition felt a bit like a gut check. The scoring was slow and much more challenging. Nearly all of the points scored on the images (79 in total) were scored in the first hour. The team worked for 2 more hours on the images and the cisco challenges, but struggled to score more points, which led to a deflated attitude by the end of hour 3 (the competition can go for 4 hours max).
After hour 3, the team decided to hang it up. Their spirits were a bit crushed and they felt they had done everything they could think of (and everything on their checklists) to find any more points. At the time it seemed reasonable to call it a day, but in hindsight I wish we had pushed ourselves for that last hour. I think the team thought that the seemingly low score left them no shot at advancing, but it turns out we were just 11 points from being in the top 25% nationwide (Gold tier – Open), which is all it would’ve taken to advance.
Here are the results:
We finished third in PA (Team 16-4516)!
We finished 278th out of 807 nation wide (Gold/Open), which put us at the top 34%, which is great for our first year, but not high enough to advance to semi-finals (we needed to be top 25%).
In retrospect, as the coach, I wish I had found a way to push the students to work for that last hour. I tried bribery (donuts) and a few other things, but I truly fell short in finding any way to inspire them. Perhaps this is because I thought we had much further to go than we actually needed. It is my hope that seeing how this all played out will help me to coach better in the future and remind the students that if they are struggling, many other teams probably are too. Every point counts.
In the end, our season is over. I think this was a great experience. It was good for the students, good for the program (I’ve taken a lot of what was done here back to the class), and hopefully a starting point for successful competitions in the future. I could not be more proud of these guys. I’m glad we did this, and I am thankful for the sponsorship and experience in the I-HACK building that Gannon was able to provide, not to mention the excellent mentoring provided by Brian Thiessen which made all of this seem feasible.
