May 2025
Spring 2025 Spirit Week
NCL Spirit Week Spring 2025 was a huge success, filled with community, creativity, and cyber pride! From challenge walkthroughs to expert panelists and wrapping it all up with the spring award ceremony, the NCL Community showed up strong to every event to celebrate the end of the spring competition season.
Highlights include:
- Individual & Team Game Walkthrough members of the Cyber Skyline team walked through various challenges from the NCL Spring 2025 Individual and Team Games.
- Soft Skills Are Crucial in Cybersecurity panel - An in-depth look at the soft skills often missing among today’s cybersecurity professionals. Jane Rainer, Vulnerability Manager, GM Financial and Ryan McCombs, IR Manager, CrowdStrike shared their insights and opinions on the importance of these skills in the modern workplace.
- How to Stand Out: Internships, Interviews & in the Cyber Community This session covered:
- Using the NCL Scouting Report: How to utilize the National Cyber League (NCL) Scouting Report to highlight skills, achievements, and hands-on experience in cybersecurity competitions.
- Creating a Powerful GitHub: How to build a GitHub portfolio that showcases coding, scripts, and security projects, making candidates more appealing to potential employers.
- Building Passion Projects: How personal projects can help demonstrate passion for cybersecurity, innovation, and problem-solving, providing concrete evidence of skills and dedication.
- Chat with the Game Creators - Cyber Skyline engineers addressed challenges that stumped students during the competition season. The live event supported Q&A from the community with special guest, Eno Dynowski, from CrowdStrike who helped connect real world scenarios with the competition challenges.
- Awards Ceremony - A community wide celebration honoring participants of the spring 2025 season. We were honored to welcome our guest speaker, Melissa Bischoping, Sr. Director, Security & Product Design Research at Tanium. During the ceremony, we announced the Top Individual Players and Teams from the standard and experienced brackets and shared our gratitude for a record breaking season!
Thanks to everyone who participated and made Spirit Week so engaging and fun! We loved seeing your energy and passion — it’s what makes the NCL Community truly one of a kind.