A Slippery Rock University student is more secure in her career planning thanks to her summer internship. Brianna Forrest, an SRU junior corporate security and homeland security dual major from Shippenville (Clarion HS), spent the summer as an intern at Westinghouse Electric in Cranberry Township, where she focused on plant layout for security purposes.
Forrest was connected to this opportunity by Brian Wisneski, SRU instructor of the homeland and corporate security, who found the opening on ASIS, a hiring platform for government and security positions. Forrest was already interested in corporate and homeland security and felt that she could use more experience in the realm of corporate nuclear security, making a position at Westinghouse ideal for her goals.
During her time at Westinghouse, Forrest was among the first people to use new software that models threats, as well as software that allowed Westinghouse to model security response times in the event of threats. When she wasn’t working with the software, Forrest sat in intern sessions, learning about nuclear issues and workplace conduct for high-security environments. Particular attention was given to disaster prevention and how modern nuclear facilities can learn from incidents at plants in the past.
“My internship exposed me to a lot that students are not normally exposed to,” Forrest said. “I worried that my knowledge in these topics just wasn’t there. This experience showed me that it really was thanks to my preparation at SRU.”
Reflecting on just how the knowledge that she gained at the University helped her in this internship, Forrest said that her Critical Infrastructure and Emergency Management classes were particularly helpful as they gave her a foundational understanding of why plants are set up as they are. These areas of knowledge that SRU helped her to develop have proven eminently applicable in a real-life career setting.
More information about the homeland and corporate security programs at SRU is available on the department’s webpage.
