Sophia Salome, a junior criminal justice major, is shaping up to be the real-life Miss Congeniality. Not only did she intern with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security this past summer, she serves as the current United States of America Miss Alabama.
“I’ve been doing pageants since I was 11 — long before I even knew what I wanted to do as a career,” she said. “My platform is child safety online and cyber hygiene in general. I want to focus on younger generations who don’t know about the dangers of online crimes and how it’s evolving every day. Sometimes, there’s also a break between what parents know and what children know because they didn’t grow up with the technology their kids have.”
At UA, Sophia is one of only nine students in the CyberCorps Scholarship for Service Program (SFS). The program covers full tuition, offers a generous stipend and allows students to earn their education free of charge in exchange for working with the federal government. It was through this program that Sophia learned of an internship with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) under the Department of Homeland Security.
“I was introduced to CISA at an online job fair hosted by SFS,” she said. “They offered me an internship with their front office working under the Chief of Staff, Kristen Todd, in Arlington, Virginia. I did research but also worked a lot with the social media team.”
Sophia said as the “youngest member of the team by at least 10 years,” her experience with various platforms such as Instagram account allowed the four-year-old agency to expand their online presence to reach a wider and more diverse audience.
“CISA’s Instagram page was severely lacking,” Sophia said. “So, I helped them create their first Instagram Reel. Everyone was so into it because none of them had ever done anything like that before. I ended up fully running the Instagram and gained them around 3,000 followers by the end of the summer.”
Sophia’s summer wasn’t all fun and Reels, however. At CISA, she worked with their School Safety Taskforce to plan the National School Safety Summit in November 2022. The summit taught school administrators and law enforcement how to deal with mental health issues and to protect students from internal and external dangers.
Sophia has also taken part in an internship right here on campus with the Cybercrime Task Force through UA’s Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice.
“This internship taught us how to use certain tools, such as cracking iPhones,” she said. “For our research project, we worked with UAPD to determine how long Apple AirTags would take to give users an alert that it’s following you and how accurate the location was.”
(It’s 12 hours, in case anyone is wondering.)
If Sophia’s schedule wasn’t packed enough, she is also on track to earn an accelerated master’s degree in criminal justice in 2024.
“The SFS scholarship has changed my life,” Sophia said. “I planned on pursuing law when I came to the University of Alabama, but when I found out about this program in Dr. Adam Ghazi-Tehrani’s cyber law and policy class, it was an amazing opportunity that most people on campus just don’t know about.”
“I picked up a cybercrime minor because I did coding in high school and have always understood technology,” she said. “I realized cybercrime is a very adapting field; it’s growing every single day and law enforcement can’t really keep up. They need people who are younger and who grew up in the digital era to be able to keep up with the adaption of technology.”
Following her graduation from the Capstone, Sophia is keeping her options open.
“USOA Pageant Nationals is in March, so my immediate future is preparing for that. I’m also applying for internships next summer for my SFS program. Hopefully it’s with the FBI,” Sophia smiled.
Experiential learning is crucial for student success. Through The Rising Tide Capital Campaign, opportunities like those Sophia has undertaken will become more available for students at the Capstone by increasing financial support and scholarships.
