<p>I have been interested in counter terrorism for the longest time and I see all these organizations (FBI, NSA, etc) that have international relations as a desired degree. I guess I always thought a degree that is more technical like finance or computer science would be more desirable over IR. What exactly does IR have that would make them so marketable for a counter-terror career?</p>
<p>I wrote a long awesome reply based on my experience in the field, but I wan’t logged in when I hit ‘post’ so it got deleted. I’ll summarize it briefly.</p>
<p>-Major doesn’t really matter. 3-letter agencies hire people for everything. Try to get a job doing the sort of work you’ll enjoy, study what you’re good at, and study to fill in your weaknesses. Either way, they have analysts who know computers, analysts who know finance, and analysts that know the history of the region. It doesn’t really matter.</p>
<p>-A lot of training is done in house so if they need people to investigate criminal banking, they’ll just send their own people to go learn about the relevant aspects of finance from other in-house experts or a special university class.</p>
<p>-Being too specific won’t hurt you, but being too general might. IR is more general than middle-eastern studies. If an agency or contractor is hiring for a mission in the middle east, they would probably prefer middle-eastern studies unless the IR guy had some relevant experience. If a job says they want someone with an IR degree, they really mean they just want someone who’s smart and knows about world politics. Is you’re a CS/electrical engineering type, if you can show that you’re smart and know about world-politics, you’d probably look better because every job is working with databases and you might need to know the tech behind how intel was gathered.</p>
<p>-Languages are huge in the intel community so if you don’t know a relevant language other than English, majoring in that would be a huge plus.</p>
<p>-If I could only give you one piece of advice, enlist in the military. Everyone here is likely to be highly favorable towards the college route, but they don’t know the intel community. Its different in 3 very important ways:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Its small and filled with ex-military guys. You will be applying against guys who have served with the people in charge of hiring, guys from the same unit, or at least people with mutual friends. Trust is huge in this community, so people want to hire people they feel they know.</p></li>
<li><p>TS/SCI clearance is very expensive. The military will pay for your clearance if you’re doing a job like sigint. If you don’t already have the clearance, people won’t want to pay for it or deal with the hassle of getting you cleared because that process can take up to 3 years.</p></li>
<li><p>There is no experience like deployment experience. Its very hard to get experience in intel as a college student. Its not unheard of for masters in electrical engineering or even career officers to get turned down in favor of 23 year olds with real-world experience but no college education.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>-Summary: My recommendation is to enlist in the Marines as a 267X cryptographic linguist. You learn a language, get a clearance, and Marines are over represented in 3-letter agencies because of reputation, network, and broader scope of training. If you don’t want to do the military route, but really want to do 3-letter agency work, focus on languages and figure out in what capacity you want to work.</p>