The nonsensical message was written on the whiteboard in professor Michael Gideon's classroom in Northern New Mexico College's High Technology building.
Gideon tasked the students in his advanced topics in cybersecurity class to decipher the message — literally. It's a manual simulation, using a several-thousand-year-old cipher, of a task computers can do almost instantaneously.
In addition to the decoded text, "Be sure to drink your Ovaltine," the exercise sends a clear message about cybersecurity practices, said Jesse Menendez, a student in his fourth year of a degree in information engineering technology.
"Encrypting is very important due to the fact that anybody can hack a system or get ahold of your stuff," he said.
Northern New Mexico College is working to expand its cybersecurity offerings for students like Menendez. In collaboration with Los Alamos National Laboratory and the National Nuclear Security Administration, the school will establish a new Center for Information Technology and Cybersecurity.
Though plans for the center are still in the early phases, the center will help the college offer bachelor's and associate degrees, as well as industry certificates with a "strong emphasis" in cybersecurity, said Ashis Nandy, chairman of Northern's Department of Engineering and Technology.
"The idea is to indoctrinate them into a mindset of security from A to Z. ... We don't know what we don't know until someone finds a vulnerability to exploit. So the idea is to let them see the need," Gideon said.
The reasoning behind the new center is simple: "This is a skillset that we need at the lab," said Frances Chadwick, staff director at LANL.
So, Northern New Mexico College will serve as the latest protégé in the lab's Mentor-Protégé Program, an initiative sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy that's designed to boost economic development near national labs across the country.
In the center's first year, Northern will receive $376,675 from the National Nuclear Security Administration to establish a faculty director position, fund outreach activities and update software and hardware. Courses held through the center are expected to begin in fall 2025.
"This is the first minority-serving higher education institution to participate as a protégé in the U.S. Department of Energy program," U.S. Sen. Ben Ray Luján, co-chair of the Senate National Labs Caucus, said in a news release announcing the partnership.
He added, "I am pleased to see the Laboratory and NNSA teaming up with Northern New Mexico College to train students for high-paying jobs."
Though the center will add to the pool of qualified, local candidates who could fill one of the lab's more than 1,000 positions in computing, Chadwick said the skills students learn won't be unique to LANL.
"It's a really good skillset for any industry; any business in New Mexico relies heavily on IT," she said.
This won't be the first partnership program between Northern and the lab, which often works with higher education institutions in workforce development. Northern has been a "great partner" in supplying the lab with qualified workers, Chadwick said, particularly through a program for radiation control technicians established with LANL's need for workers in mind.
There's an upside for the college, too, Nandy said: "These are really high-paying jobs, even at the entry level, so I think this should hopefully attract more students."
Work at LANL and in cybersecurity is on students' minds.
Andrew Garcia, another fourth-year student in information engineering technology, started working at the lab right out of high school.
The program at Northern was the right fit, Garcia said: He didn't want to move too far from his hometown of Pojoaque, and he wanted to keep his job at LANL while working through college.
Mendendez is earning his degree between shifts at the lab, too.
Both students agreed they can implement what they're learning right away — even if they'll have to keep learning to keep their skills sharp in an always-evolving field.
"We're always going to have to learn something new, but it would be good to learn what we know now. ... I feel like the more you learn in IT, the more you will get a job somewhere," Menendez said.
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