Computer Science Alumni Spotlight: Jesse Holland, Class of 2022
Part 9 of a 40th anniversary series celebrating Tennessee Tech computer science alumni and the advancement of the Department of Computer Science, established in 1986.
By the time Jesse Holland graduated in 2022, computing had moved beyond the lab and into the cloud.
“While I was a student, I’d say the largest emerging technology was the shift to cloud computing,” the Tennessee Tech alumnus said. “Companies across the country were beginning to explore their options.”
That change has continued as Holland started his computer science career at Tennessee Valley Authority.
“These days, we are seeing more and more companies move at least part of their infrastructure to the cloud,” he said. “It’s important to be aware of how this technology works because it doesn’t appear to be a trend that is going away soon.”
Holland’s time at Tennessee Tech overlapped briefly with the COVID-19 pandemic, though its impact on his experience was relatively limited. When he began his master’s program in 2021, he took one semester of remote classes before returning to in-person instruction.
“I was unable to truly meet my peers and make friends, but that was quickly resolved the following semester,” he said. “That being said, my education was what I cared about more than anything as I was surrounded by family during that time, and I feel my education was not largely impacted by remote learning.”
Beyond the classroom, some of his most memorable experiences came through competitions. In 2021 and 2022, he and his teammates competed in the Collegiate Penetration Testing Competition, spending long hours sharpening their cybersecurity skills.
“I remember being ‘locked’ in Eric Brown’s basement for the competition,” he joked, referring to the remote setup used by Tech’s team. Competitors worked from the home of Eric Brown, senior lecturer, transforming the space into a temporary cybersecurity operations center. “I learned a lot that day and had a ton of fun.”
The team’s dedication paid off as they went on to place third at the global level—an achievement Holland considers one of his proudest moments.
Looking ahead, he sees cybersecurity and artificial intelligence becoming increasingly intertwined.
“I personally am excited to see how the security tools we use are going to continue to evolve over the next decade,” he said.
“AI is likely to continue to change the information technology field and have a large impact on cybersecurity. We are already seeing adversaries leverage AI to both develop new exploits and to help find potential targets for those exploits. I suspect we will start to see more AI built into defensive tools as a result—machine learning is already heavily used in behavioral analysis—and we may one day see a future where AI models are commonplace for both offensive and defensive cybersecurity.”
Professional Highlights
Jesse Holland is a cybersecurity analyst II at Tennessee Valley Authority, where he has built his career over the past five years. He joined TVA as an intern while studying at Tennessee Tech and transitioned into a full‑time role shortly after graduation. Today, he works on the incident response and operations team, partnering with groups across the organization to help secure cloud posture. More recently, he has worked to improve security posture for operations technology. Holland is particularly proud of being part of the team that won the Department of Energy’s Boss of the SOC competition, hosted by Splunk, for the past two years.
Computer Science in the 2020s
- 2021 – Renovation of Bruner Hall is completed.
- 2023 – Tennessee Tech houses largest undergraduate computer science program in Tennessee.
- 2024 – Computer Science is Tech’s most-enrolled major.
- 2024 – Ashraf Islam Engineering Building is completed, housing CEROC and new computer science classrooms and labs.
- 2024 – Machine Intelligence & Data Science (MInDS) Center is approved.
- 2025 – Advanced Scalable Computing, Extreme Networks & Data (ASCEND) Center is approved, advancing high-performance computing and networking.
- 2025 – Computer Science ranks within Tennessee among the top three programs overall and the top two among public universities. (U.S. News & World Report)
- 2025 – Standalone Ph.D. in Computer Science launches.
- 2026 – B.S. in Artificial Intelligence launches, the first of its kind in Tennessee.