[W]hat made the experience most valuable was the chance to work across identity management, endpoint security, and vulnerability assessment simultaneously, giving me a much more holistic understanding of enterprise security than I would have gotten from a single-focus role.
Name: Kalpesh Parmar
Major: Cybersecurity Engineering
Employer: Bridge Tower
Location: Dallas, TX
How did you find the internship/co-op? What was the interview process like? I found this internship through Glassdoor's Easy Apply feature. Given the high volume of Easy Apply submissions, I honestly didn't expect much to come of it and wasn't actively tracking the application. However, I received an unexpected callback, which kicked off a three-round interview process. The first round was an initial screening, the second round was a technical interview assessing my cybersecurity and IT skills, and the third and final round was conducted by the managing partner, which focused more on fit and overall alignment with the company's goals.
What have been the most interesting aspects of your internship? One of the most engaging aspects has been the breadth of hands-on exposure to a fully cloud-native Microsoft 365 environment. This gave me the opportunity to work across multiple interconnected workstreams rather than a single narrow project. For example, I led a comprehensive Entra ID and Microsoft 365 security baseline audit, evaluating Conditional Access policies, Defender for Office 365 configurations, guest access controls, and MFA enforcement through Duo. I also worked on a large-scale Intune MDM enrollment initiative.
I also found the SSO consolidation project particularly interesting, as it involved federating several business-critical platforms using SAML 2.0 and OIDC. This required careful attention to identity mapping and a phased migration approach to avoid disrupting business operations. Additionally, conducting a vulnerability assessment against company domains gave me practical, offensive-security experience that complemented the identity and access management work I was doing on the defensive side.
Overall, what made the experience most valuable was the chance to work across identity management, endpoint security, and vulnerability assessment simultaneously, giving me a much more holistic understanding of enterprise security than I would have gotten from a single-focus role.
What campus activities or courses do you think helped you, or would have helped you, with this internship? Several courses in my Master of Engineering in Cybersecurity program at the University of Maryland directly prepared me for this role. My Penetration Testing course (ENPM634) gave me hands-on experience with tools and methodologies I later applied during the vulnerability assessments, firewall configuration, and structured reporting through exercises like our King of the Hill exercises and post-exploitation write-ups. My Network Security course (ENPM693) built a strong foundation in traffic analysis and encrypted channel attacks, which translated well into auditing Conditional Access policies and understanding how identity and network layers interact in a cloud-native environment. I also found my Machine Learning for Cybersecurity course (ENPM604) useful for thinking critically about anomaly detection and threat patterns, which is increasingly relevant as security tooling incorporates more automated detection.
Beyond coursework, independent projects were just as valuable. Building and analyzing a T-Pot honeypot on AWS, where I mapped over 10,000 attack events to the MITRE ATT&CK framework using Elasticsearch and Kibana, sharpened my ability to interpret real-world attack telemetry.
Finally, engaging with the broader security community—attending conferences like BSides NYC and CyberWarCon and volunteering with Cloud Village SpeakerOps—exposed me to current industry practices and emerging threats well before I encountered them in a professional setting, which helped me approach problems at BridgeTower GP with more context and confidence.
How would you describe the company culture? What was the most helpful thing your supervisor did to make you feel comfortable at the organization? The culture at the company has been collaborative and supportive. As a lean organization, the team trusted me with real responsibility early on rather than limiting me to observational tasks. There was a strong sense that my contributions genuinely mattered to the organization's operations, which made the experience feel meaningful rather than routine.
What advice would you give other UMD engineering students seeking an internship or co-op position? My biggest piece of advice is to apply early, but don't lose hope even if you only have a couple of months left before you need to start. Opportunities can come from anywhere, often when you least expect them. Persistence matters more than any single application, so keep applying broadly and stay open to opportunities even through channels that seem like long shots.
Top