FIU Jack D. Gordon Institute Fellowship

Offered by FIU's Jack Gordon Institute of Public Policy, the IC-CAE Fellowship is a one-year workforce development program that fuses Worlds-Ahead academics with mentorship, research experience, and professional development to strengthen student competitiveness and improve prospective employment within the U.S. intelligence community and leading-edge private sector employers.  This past year, I had the opportunity of being an IC-CAE Fellow, and now Scholar.  The fellowship is tripartite: there's six academic courses we must take, a capstone year-long individual research project, and professional development opportunities made accessible to us.

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I had never heard of the fellowship nor of the intelligence community -- the only things I knew were that the CIA and the FBI existed, and that they lay in a world of spycraft inaccessible to the general public.  One of my Global Learning professors, though, took me aside and said they thought I would be good candidate for this fellowship.  I had no idea what I wanted to do with my international relations degree after graduation and was open to exploring my options so, after just two months of living in Miami, I applied for the program.  Little did I know, that I had made one of the best, most transformative decisions of my life yet.

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The nature of the field meant I had to upend my entire way of thinking, writing, and speaking.  Academic writing was to be scrapped for one-page summaries packed with citations and facts with a Bottom-Line-Up-Front (BLUF) style.  Lengthy presentations were to be shortened to 5 minutes, no more, no less, where we would outline the "what [was happening]"and the "so what [why is this important]".  Improving our critical thinking skills meant using Structured Analytic Techniques to remove as much bias from our research as possible.  The learning curve was brutal, but it was beautiful.  I loved this new way of writing, thinking, and speaking.  Everything was factual, straight to the point, and short.

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During the fellowship, I worked in a group collecting all-source intelligence on non-state cyber actor attacks, producing intelligence briefs twice a week for six weeks.  Moreover, under the guidance of NCTC, I conducted individual open-source research on key drivers for the expansion of JNIM, an Al-Qaeda affiliated terrorist organization in West Africa.  I then briefed senior NCTC intelligence officials on this topic in March 2023, and conducted a separate briefing for USAID senior leadership during the FIU Undergraduate Research conference in April 2023.  These experiences have informed my teamwork, research, and writing skills, which are critical for a Global Learning Medallion student.  Below, I have included photos of different conferences and teambuilding sessions between IC-CAE fellows!  I am grateful for my time in the fellowship, and look forward to seeing where my friends and I end up in the future.