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At the Costello College of Business at George Mason University, students can expect to engage in experiential learning, both through experts brought into the classroom and visits to outside organizations.
At the end of the 2025 spring semester, Brian Ngac, an instructional assistant professor of Information Systems and Operations Management (ISOM) at the Costello College of Business and FWI Corporate Partner Faculty Fellow, and Nirup Menon, professor of ISOM at Costello, received word that another one of their experiential learning proposals won a grant from the Commonwealth Cyber Initiative (CCI). This grant garners additional funding to scale and enhance George Mason University’s Professional Readiness Experiential Program (PREP). An Experiential Learning (EXL) Program, PREP was started by Ngac to give honors and high-performing students hands-on experience on real impactful projects with real companies.
The 2025-2026 CCI EXL Grant enables PREP to enhance the cybersecurity workforce by recruiting students—a total of 30 are accepted—interested in the field and pairing them with industry partners. Students accepted into PREP can expect to be mentored by both industry participants and faculty members as they develop and deliver client-facing project presentations.
PREP is not possible without its partners. And it has great ones—several of whom are eager to continue working with PREP after past success with the program. Among them are Mobius Consulting, LLC, and FedWriters (FWI). “Mobius Consulting, LLC is proud to partner with the Commonwealth Cyber Initiative and George Mason University on the 2025 Experiential Learning Program,” says Lashdeep Singh, director of operations at Mobius Consulting, LLC. “Mobius is an award-winning, SBA Woman-Owned Small Business. We’re honored to support this initiative by mentoring students, contributing to project-based learning, and helping build a stronger cybersecurity workforce. We look forward to advancing this mission alongside CCI and our academic and industry partners.” As part of the program, Mobius will present a hands-on Microsoft Sentinel workshop to teach students how to create and operate a security operations center within the Microsoft Azure cloud platform.
Mitchel Cho, a George Mason alumnus and CEO of FWI, is also excited to participate, saying, “FWI is proud to support GMU’s PREP initiative and thrilled to see it recognized through this important funding. This initiative equips students with the technical and client-facing skills needed in today’s cyber landscape, while creating a strong pipeline of agile, industry-ready professionals.” For their part in PREP, FWI will conduct a seminar on the cybersecurity maturity model certification implementation that they recently completed.
Additionally, both Mobius and FWI will be hosting some of the student participants in the program. MAXIMUS, a large business focused on technology innovation in government and healthcare, has graciously agreed to be another industry participant.
Aligning with the CCI’s objectives in education, innovation, and workforce development, PREP runs its experiential learning projects for a total of 125 hours, so the student participant can choose to work those hours over 3, 6, or 12 weeks. Student participants will receive competitive stipends for their hours completed.
Since PREP first began in spring of 2021, multiple students have been hired full time by the industry participant following project completion. Even if they are not directly hired, the students can expect specialized training, technical experience, the opportunity to be published, all furthering their successful transition into the cybersecurity field. If your organization is interested in becoming an industry participant, please contact Brian Ngac at bngac@gmu.edu.