At a young age, Will Nowak was drawn to computers and wanted to learn how they worked. But at a small school like Westbrook High School (WHS), there wasn't a computer course to help him advance his skills. So instead, he found a way to work with Principal Robert Hale and get practical computer training through volunteering his services.

His role was to help school staff troubleshoot problems with their computers and, when asked, to set up new computers and printers when they arrived at the school. And he watched and he learned.

"I supported the needs of the network at WHS. If a particular printer needed to be added, I did it," Will says.

In the summers while in high school, he and a few friends were hired by the school district to set up new computers that had been purchased for the district. They would remove the computers, printers, and cables from the boxes and then configure them to be ready for students and staff when school began. (When his work was done, Will could often be seen sailing in the summers with the Pilots Point Sailing Club).

At Northeastern University, his interest in computer systems and networks strengthened. As a freshman, he joined the volunteer systems support group that helped other students troubleshoot their computer problems and resolve network issues.

But it was at a national information technology conference in San Diego he was asked to attend with Northeastern University's director of technology that he found his first real-world internship in the field. There he met a representative from Google and successfully made a connection that led to the first of three co-op internships he had with Google.

While in his first, three-month co-op with Google as a sophomore, he stayed connected with his home Computer Science Department at Northeastern; this allowed him to join in-and participate remotely-as a member of the university's 2008 team in the annual national cyber-security competition. From January through April of that year, the team studied and practiced on various scenarios to be ready to compete in the National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (CCDC). Each Saturday morning the team would go to a conference room and Will would join the group via a Skype call. That year, the team placed second in the Northeast Regionals competition.

In 2009, the Northeastern University team tried again and placed first in the regional competition and in San Antonio in April 2009 placed second in the national competition.

In February 2010, the Northeastern University team again placed first in the regional competition. But this time, Northeastern University's team won it all, beating out eight other collegiate computer teams at the national CCDC in Texas. This year's event also had a special observer: Howard Schmidt, the White House's cyber-security coordinator.

The national, three-day CCDC contest "focuses on the operational aspect of managing and protecting an existing "commercial" network infrastructure." (Visit www.nationalccdc.org for more information.)

"This year the scenario was that one company is acquiring another. It's a hostile takeover. Employees of the company being taken over are angry and take steps to keep back-door computer access in order to harm the company in the future," explains Will.

"Our team's role, working for the acquiring company, is to do everything we could to find misconfigurations planted in the network and fix them," he says. "A professional team of hackers [who play the role of the disgruntled employees] try to attack the company's website and network throughout the competition.

"As a team, you have the dual task of having to keep the company's business running while also protecting it from the outside attackers," says Will.

Will, who graduated from Northeastern University this month, was home for just two weeks before moving on to Mountain View, California, to start his first post-college job as a site reliability engineer for Google.

While still interested in the area of cyber-security, Will says his real interests lie elsewhere.

"Personally, I am more interested in running the infrastructure that facilitates the running of a business," he says.

And now he's off to California to do just that.