<p>I am currently a freshman in college with all A's and I am having great difficulty deciding what major I want to pursue. It is my dream to join the CIA specifically the clandestine division and I am also very interested in the FBI specifically the criminal investigations division. I've had a very bad head injury when I was very young and I'm afraid this may disqualify me from joining one of the 2 so I have a plan C which I want to be able to fall back on a civilian job but I still want to be able to travel and I don't want to just sit in an office all day but I wish to be able to interact with people and use my mind to solve problems. What major would be good for all three of these things? I've been thinking maybe a major in finance and a minor in international affairs or something of the sort.</p>
<p>Most of your answers can be found here:
<a href=“https://www.cia.gov/careers/opportunities/clandestine”>https://www.cia.gov/careers/opportunities/clandestine</a>
<a href=“https://www.fbijobs.gov/11.asp”>https://www.fbijobs.gov/11.asp</a></p>
<p>Getting past Phase 1 for the FBI is all about the “check boxes”. The most versatile path is to do the following:</p>
<ol>
<li> Join the National Guard or Army Reserve to get some military experience in a part-time environment.</li>
<li> Get a BS Computer Science/Computer Engineering/Electrical Engineering and carry no educational debt. (Debt levels may affect the ability to obtain a security clearance which you will need for both the FBI and CIA).</li>
<li> Learn a target foreign language such as Chinese, Russian, or Arabic.</li>
<li> Branch combat arms/maneuver as a commissioned officer to gain leadership/management experience.</li>
<li> Find meaningful full-time employment. (With a security clearance and and a CS/CE/EE degree, should not be hard).</li>
<li> Work on a MS Computer Science/Electrical Engineering part-time while working full time.</li>
<li> Get professional military courses out of the way as soon as possible so you don’t have to worry about them later on. (Captains Career Courses for different career management fields, Intermediate Level Education, etc.)</li>
<li> Decide whether you want to go for a MBA/JD, etc.</li>
</ol>
<p>Most that are offered a position/career with the FBI and CIA have substantial work experience prior to joining.</p>
<p>I’m worried if I get some computer degree they’re going to stick me at a desk and that’s exactly what I don’t want</p>
<p>Also to the first reply. The CIA website says nothing about what degrees to major in, and the FB I’s is just a basis of what you can major in and it still doesn’t guarantee field work. </p>
<p>You may have all the boxes checked for the CIA, but if you don’t have the personality traits the NCS look for, you are not going to get picked. It’s nothing personal, just they are looking for specific personality types that can do the work of clandestine officers. Polo08816’s list is pretty good as far as qualifications go. I’d add that the FBI loves people with accounting degrees as white collar financial crime is increasingly common in their cases. </p>
<p>what do you mean by “field work”?</p>
<p>the NCS is not James Bond. They spend tons of time at desks.</p>
<p>field·work
ˈfēldwərk/
noun
1.
practical work conducted by a researcher in the natural environment, rather than in a laboratory or office.</p>
<p>Now that we’ve got that little lesson out of the way, I’m not an idiot, I know what the clandestine unit does, but I do not want to be working in a lab all day or sitting around analyzing data that has been collected by other people. I want to be the one out there collecting the data in person through dealing with actual people not a computer screen all day, five days a week.</p>
<p>Have you considered the career path of military officer and serving as an attache? or does your injury count that out?</p>
<p>There are lots (well, at least some…) of books out there written by these types of people and some of them talk about their training / college educations. Have you read them?</p>
<p>The fact is that honestly these careers recruit from tons of majors. I think the best thing you can do is prove your ability to learn a foreign language by taking lots of classes and studying abroad.</p>
<p>As always I am going to agree with what Soccerguy said above, trying Air National Guard after getting a BA and becoming an Intel Officer may be a good segway in. For Clandestine Ops I would have to guess International Affairs or IR would be the most relevant major you got get a BA in, but maybe a regional specific study is the way to go (Asia, Eurasia, or Middle East) take on at least one langauge Farsi, Arabic, Urdu, Mandarin, Pashtun will likely be in high demand for a long time. </p>
<p>I probably know some folks in CIA clandestine but I also don’t know who they are, for reasons that should be obvious. I do know an ex-NSA field operative, and I can confirm that in his case @Polo08816’s path is spot-on. A mixture of military background and computer/electronic knowhow was the key, with knowledge of strategically significant languages providing a significant bonus. In his case, the financial skills mentioned by @NoVADad99 also helped his profile.</p>
<p>Your concern about your head injury is wise. Field work for any agency is a high-stress job with physical demands above the average. This is another reason why they like ex-military folks, especially those with combat experience: they have already proven the ability to cope with demands approaching those the agency will require.</p>
<p>The head injury may well disqualify you from even the most standard military service, so while I wouldn’t discourage you from chasing your dream I would encourage you to be realistic about it. </p>
<p>The majority of jobs in the CIA, NSA, FBI, and even the Secret Service are desk jobs. Only a small percentage ever make it into field work, and an even smaller percentage make it into the kind of field-work you are romanticizing in your dreams. The typical field agent is embedded in a specific place and not doing much travel. They’re executing routine assignments based on their intimate local knowledge far more often than they are solving new problems with their mind.</p>
<p>Even the fittest candidate possible would still have to traverse a highly selective path to ever get in the field, and once there he/she might end up doing the equivalent of exotic desk work transcribing sigint in a foreign country or running a daily dead drop. Intelligence and investigation are both far more routine than you may realize. Monotonous, even.</p>
<p>No. Being an intel officer in the military is the least likely path to being selected for NCS. They would prefer operator types (SF), or someone who has the extrovert social skills to chat up strangers and who can think on his feet in strange situations.</p>
<p>@NoVADad99 Well, I think there are certainly other paths that are far less likely to being selected for NCS.</p>
<p>In the Army, the military intelligence branch is heavy on Captains to Lieutenant Colonels (stove-pipe). It is very possible some military intelligence officers have spent the junior part of their careers as combat arms/maneuver officers.</p>
<p>Also, with combat deployments drawing down, our foreign engagements these days are more intelligence driven than before. Military intelligence units generally have a higher operational tempo in the reserves than our maneuver brigades.</p>
<p>Their mission set is probably more in line with what the FBI and CIA are looking for. However, I would still argue that combat arms/maneuver background has an edge in developing leadership/management experience.</p>
<p>@polo08816 For intelligence analysts working in the DI, an MI background would be a good fit. For NCS, they recruit more the types along the lines of Bob Baer or Valerie Plame.</p>
<p>FWIW: the CIA recruited pretty aggressively at my law school. They also actively recruited at my college, but it has kind of longstanding historical ties with the agency. I didn’t interview with them at either stage, but they seemed to be interested in general liberal-arts-type majors. The only person I know who (I think) did a stint with the CIA, clandestinely, was recruited by them when he was a practicing lawyer. He had no military background, though he rather mysteriously became a major in the Army for a short period of time, as well as a foreign service officer in a touchy geographic region.</p>