MTU Cybersecurity Society(Re)founder and Chairperson
How It Came About
When I started at MTU, the Cybersecurity Society technically already existed — but only on paper. Its previous board had finished their masters and moved on without leaving a legacy behind them: no handover, no committee, no plan for who came next. The society had been dormant for close to a year.
Cybersecurity is my degree and my genuine interest, and it seemed like a waste that a university with MTU's cyber credentials didn't have a student community to match. So alongside a group of my peers, I set out to bring it back.
Rebuilding it meant starting from the ground up:
- Learning from the people who came before. We tracked down and met with former members to understand what the society had been, what had worked, and what had caused it to stall — so we wouldn't repeat the same mistake of building something that couldn't outlive us.
- Getting the university behind us. We liaised with MTU faculty and the Head of the Computer Science Department to re-establish the society properly and make sure it had institutional support.
- Putting a real committee in place. We held an AGM, elected a full board, and gave every role a clear owner.
- Starting to run events again. CTFs, industry talks, hackathons, and a space for people to actually turn up to.
I was elected Chairperson, and within a few months the society went from inactive to sending students onto panels at a global telecoms conference.
MTU is one of Ireland's leading cybersecurity hubs — home to Cork's Nimbus Research Centre, its national Cyber Range and prototyping labs, dedicated cyber degrees, and the €7M Cyber Innovate programme. The society exists to bring that world within reach of students: hands-on skills, CTFs, and real connections to Ireland's cyber industry.
At its heart, though, it's about people. It's a space where students connect, collaborate, and grow together, with no experience required — from complete beginners to seasoned hackers. A community built on curiosity, teamwork, and a shared drive to learn.
The Story So Far
AGM & RelaunchFeb, 2026
The society is officially active again. After almost a year of inactivity, we held our AGM to elect a board and set out our plans for the semester and beyond — from CTFs to HackSpaces to industry talks. It was here that I was elected Chairperson, becoming the first ever first-year to be elected to such a prestigious position. The turnout and engagement on the night confirmed what we'd suspected: the appetite for this community had been there all along.
CTF Training Night & Mini CompetitionMarch 2026
Meeting new members where they are. Capture the Flag competitions are one of the best on-ramps into practical security work — but they're intimidating if nobody has ever explained them to you. So we ran a session that did exactly that: what a CTF actually is, how to approach the different challenge categories, and which resources and platforms members could use to keep practising on their own. We then put the theory straight into practice with our own mini CTF competition, so everyone in the room got to solve something themselves before they went home.
MTU Society AwardsMarch 2026
A young society gets a mention. A great night for the society, and a real marker of progress. It was brilliant to see the range of societies across MTU turn out — and, as one of the newest societies in the room, to be mentioned at all. It was equally valuable as inspiration: seeing what more established societies had built gave us a clear sense of what we could aim for next.
ROCCO Genesis 2026, LimerickJune 2026
Our members on a global stage. Society members attended ROCCO Genesis 2026, a global telecoms conference held in Limerick.
Speaking on the "Human & Artificial Intelligence" panel. As Chairperson, I was invited to sit on the panel alongside leaders from across the industry, exploring a question at the heart of our field: as AI becomes more capable, what is the irreplaceable role of human intelligence?
Competing in the "Trust the Signal" hackathon. Our members took on a real-world security challenge — how do we build trust into SMS and voice communication? — with mentorship from the teams at Verizon and Cellusys.
Beyond the panel and the hackathon, the conference put our members in the same room as students from universities across Ireland and industry leaders from around the world. Watching the society work with (and occasionally against 😅) each other, and seeing how far we'd come in only a few months, was the clearest proof yet that rebuilding this was worth doing.
Onwards — and I can't wait to see what we take on next.