In high school, teenager Tejah Bean was focused on a future career in law until the Bermuda Government experienced a crippling cyber incident.

When it happened, she had just joined The Berkeley Institute’s coding club and was developing a passion for technology. She was intrigued by the Government’s predicament and longed to jump into the fray to help sort things out.

“I thought this is going to be a real big issue in the future,” she said.

She began to think of some way to combine her interest in law and her interest in cybersecurity.

Ms Bean took part in the Berkeley Accelerated Summer Institute to earn extra credit and was a dual-enrolment student at the Bermuda College.

After graduating from Berkeley a year early, she went to England to pursue a bachelor’s degree overseas.

This year the 19-year-old graduated from the University of Lancaster‘s Manchester-based University Academy 92 programme earning a bachelor’s degree in computer science with first-class honours. UA92 focuses on careers and employment, and Ms Bean took an accelerated two-year programme there.

For one of her final projects she built a compliance assistant that reads through complex global regulations.

“Instead of digging through hundreds of pages of legal text, you can just ask a plain-English question like ‘are we allowed to do X’ and get a clear answer back with the exact source it came from,” she said.

“It works by breaking the regulations down into searchable chunks, finding the most relevant sections for your question, and then using a language model to turn that into a direct, readable answer rather than a wall of legal text.”

She is now at the University of Manchester starting a master’s in international and security law. The ultimate goal is to earn her doctorate.

Ms Bean credits her mother, Talibah Branch, with encouraging her to strive.

“She raised my twin sister, Tange, and me on her own,” she said. “Tange is studying medicine at Edge Hill University in Lancashire. My mother really pushed us, telling us that the way to get out of poverty was through education. She has taught us that we can do anything we put our minds to.”

Last year, Ms Bean did an internship in the legal and compliance department at Chubb. This summer she completed an internship in the cyber-risk department at the Bermuda Monetary Authority.

“It was a great experience,” she said. “I got to learn a lot about regulation and supervision.”

Over the course of her university career she has won scholarships and financial support from the Association of Bermuda International Companies, Conduit Re, the Ministry of Education, Appleby, Belco and Axa XL.

She wanted to share her story to inspire others.

“I want people in middle school and high school to know that no matter what they think is possible, they can do whatever they want in life,” she said.

“No matter if they are from a low economic background or they are not that good in school, anything is possible if they put in the effort.”