NMSU business students receive national insurance organization recognition

A small team of students at New Mexico State University’s College of Business is making a big impact with an article that was recently published by the National Alliance for Insurance Education and Research.

The paper is titled “School Districts Targeted for Cyber Attacks: Is Yours Prepared?” and spotlights the Las Cruces Public Schools ransomware attack in 2019. It was written as a partial fulfillment of a class on Insurance and the Law at NMSU’s College of Business taught by Dwight Kealy, college professor of business law and insurance attorney.

“It was exciting to see the article these students worked on get published in a national publication. I consider it an honor to be included as an “et al.” with these undergrads,” Kealy shared.

Eleven students and Kealy worked together on the article and were split into two groups. With growing technology and more growing threats online, the focus was to highlight how cyber insurance can be beneficial for school districts and other companies.

One of the students involved in the project includes Tavyn Trujillo, the daughter of late LCPS Superintendent Karen Trujillo. A junior at NMSU, Tavyn Trujillo was instrumental in writing the paper while conducting research with LCPS.

“I was able to get in contact with people my mom used to work with at LCPS, and I interviewed Matt Dawkins, director of Information Technology at LCPS, so that was my big part to start with,” Trujillo said. “We wrote the abstract as a whole class and throughout the course of it, we edited it together. So, my part was the LCPS side of the research, and the other group was the cyber security in general and then we came together as a class and added our parts together.”

Trujillo was listed as the first author of the article, and the rest of the authors are listed alphabetically as follows: Adrianna Baeza; Celina Camarillo-Dilbert; David Devore; Hannah Draper; Alex Guljas; Tyler Hoffman; Dwight Kealy; Aaliyah Mesa; Leonardo Ramos; Nathaniel Rowe; and Yoselin Terrazas.

“I was very humbled and it’s really cool to see the outcome of your work and when it gets noticed by people,” Trujillo said. “It was definitely a group effort. Throughout the course, we became a little group of friends just because it was a small class, and we were all able to work with each other and communicate. I think that’s probably been the best group project that I’ve been a part of, because everyone was willing and able to meet and work with one another.”

While receiving a significant recognition, Trujillo said she wants to continue her mother’s legacy at NMSU and give back to others.

“She definitely has very big shoes to fill, and I think NMSU has always been a big part of our lives in our family’s story, my grandparents even came to NMSU,” Trujillo said. “I’m so blessed and honored to be able to come here with everything that we have to offer. I think especially when I get older, I want to keep giving back. We started a foundation in my mom’s name, hosted the golf tournament here at NMSU and have given out the first scholarship here, so that’s just been really awesome. I’m very proud to have been able to call her my mom, and I just want to continue her legacy, talk about education and how important that is.”

To read the full article, visit https://www.scic.com/school-districts-targeted-for-cyber-attacks-is-yours-prepared/.