Long Island STEM Hub Career Conversations event targets teens
Matt Pascucci, the security operations director at an investment firm, speaks at a Long Island STEM HUB Career Conversations program in the Cradle of Aviation Museum in Garden City on Saturday. Credit: Debbie Egan-Chin
Matt Pascucci knows firsthand how daunting it can be to pick a career at a young age.
Growing up in Hicksville, he thought he would work in law enforcement before taking a different path to becoming an executive in a field that didn’t yet exist: cybersecurity.
Pascucci, 41, whose career began with information technology internships as a teenager, and other speakers at the first Long Island STEM Hub Career Conversations event Saturday at Cradle of Aviation Museum told the dozens of students in attendance that it’s never too early to think about a career in technology. Through learning opportunities and networking, the next generation can also make the leap into one of the growing science, technology, engineering and math-related careers already offered on Long Island, they said.
“I fell into cybersecurity kind of by accident,” Pascucci, the security operations director for a Manhattan investment firm, told Newsday. “Now I can’t get away from this. It’s literally everywhere.”
He estimated that nationally there are 700,000 unfilled jobs in cybersecurity, a field that touches every industry.
Zachary Singleton, a cybersecurity analyst for the U.S. Department of Defense, isn’t too far removed from being a teen in the audience. A 2021 graduate of New York Institute of Technology, Singleton grew up in Ridge obsessed with video games and building his own computer gaming systems. As a student at Longwood High School, he realized he had an aptitude for working with computers. Three years after graduation, he became the first student to complete Suffolk County Community College’s cybersecurity program.
Today, Singleton is based in the Washington, D.C., Metro area, spending each working day investigating cyber threats from hackers in foreign nations.
He told the students that the relationships he built as a student, including through an internship at Brookhaven National Laboratory, got him where he is today.
“Now I’ve made it my mission to reach back out to my school and professors to give back [to younger students],” Singleton said.
One of those mentors is Michael Nizich, director of the Entrepreneurship and Technology Innovation Center and adjunct computer science professor at NYIT, who helped assemble the panel Saturday.
Nizich said one of the biggest mistakes students make in not pursuing a STEM path is thinking they are not good at math or science and therefore not qualified based on that one deficiency.
“Stop that,” he said, adding that STEM fields are loaded with people who fill roles due to their artistic, investigative or social skills.
And cybersecurity isn’t the only path to take. NYIT graduate Shanjeetha Kirupananthan explained how she became a software engineer for Boeing, working on Navy planes and the unmanned aircraft being developed to fuel them in midair.
Skyler Friedman, a high school freshman from Cold Spring Harbor, said the event helped him unlock the next steps to finding his career path.
“If everything goes well, I want to go into aeronautical engineering,” he said.
The free Saturday morning events, geared toward students in grades 8-12 and aimed at connecting industry with education, will continue monthly through the end of the school year. Future discussions will cover careers in manufacturing, aviation, energy and health care.
Grant Parpan covers Suffolk County courts and federal courts for Newsday. A Long Island native, he joined Newsday in 2022.
