Students take advantage of our Washington location to visit congressional hearings and other events where they see CSIA issues debated and policy formulated. Often, professors asked to speak at these events invite the students along. For example, when Professor Kwon spoke at Blackhat, she was able to bring along six scholarship students, all of whom worked for the conference coordinator and had networking experiences with all of the conference speakers. When she spoke at FOSE 2009, she brought along five students. When Professor Hoffman moderated a panel at the State of the Net Conference in January 2010 on "Cyberwar: Is Congress Planning for the Common Defense?", three students attended not only that panel but several others at the conference.

Sometimes the events come to the students, such as in Summer 2009, when the ACM Computers, Freedom, and Privacy Conference took place at the GW Marvin Center on campus and when the Information Security and Privacy Advisory Board that advises the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the Office of Management and Budget holds its periodic, regularly scheduled meetings also there on campus. Other events the students are made aware of that take place on campus, on Capitol Hill, or nearby are the Department of Homeland Security Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee meetings, workshops such as the DHS Workshop on Government Use of Commercial Data for Homeland Security, Federal Trade Commission privacy workshops, NIST security workshops and meetings on election security, etc.

The grant also supports student registration at conferences such as Shmoo.con, BlackHat, and others when they come to town. Most of our graduates have gone to several of these. Many have also taken a field trip to the National Cryptologic Museum adjacent to the headquarters of the National Security Agency in nearby Fort Meade, Maryland.

Students visit various conferences that match their security interests. For example, we have had CyberCorps students travel to Crypto, the annual International Cryptography Conference and to the RSA Conference. GW has also had a team of master's and undergraduate students compete at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Competition of the National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition.