Name: Penny McKenzie; Institution: Columbia Basin College; Program: DOE's Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internship (SULI); Education Level: Undergraduate Student
October 26, 2020
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Internships are an avenue for Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) staff to share their knowledge and passion for their work, according to Penny McKenzie, a cybersecurity engineer at the lab who discovered her passion for computer science and cybersecurity through a series of internships as a student in her 30s at Columbia Basin College, a community college in Pasco.
McKenzie spent her early career working in customer service jobs as she raised her daughter. When her daughter reached high school, McKenzie applied for and was accepted into a worker retraining program that led to a computer science class at Columbia Basin College.
“I was like, ‘Wow, this is really crazy. I really love this. I know I can do this,’” she recalled.
Her interest led to an internship at Idaho National Laboratory (INL) in Idaho Falls, Idaho. A mentor there encouraged her to apply for a bachelor’s degree in cybersecurity at Columbia Basin College (CBC).
“Again, I found that I absolutely loved it. I was really good at it and it was just crazy in my mind that I was good at something different than customer service,” McKenzie said.
Because of the knowledge that I learned for the whole year and a half of my internship at PNNL, I got hired right away.
She applied for another internship through the Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internship (SULI) program and was accepted for a cybersecurity internship at INL. The following year, she applied for another SULI and found a placement doing industrial control systems cybersecurity at PNNL, which is closer to her family and home.
The PNNL internship spurred McKenzie to do a capstone research project at CBC on industrial control systems cybersecurity, a project that she presented during her interview for a full-time job with PNNL.
“Because of the knowledge that I learned for the whole year and a half of my internship at PNNL, I got hired right away,” she said. “I would never have done anything differently because, I think, all those experiences really set me up for the success that I have now.”
Today, McKenzie is passing on the knowledge she’s gained through ongoing outreach to cybersecurity students at CBC as well as participating as a mentor teacher in area high schools, teaching summer camps at the lab and hosting interns of her own.