<p>I'm currently playing with the notion of a future in the CIA, which would be totally awesome. I wouldn't want to be a field operative or anything, just like the guy that sits at the desk and analyzes stuff, kind of like that guy in The Good Shepherd. okay, actually i want to be the guy in the good shepherd. so what sort of courses should i take at u chicago to best prepare me to be a total badass? also, does the CIA recruit at u chicago? and i'm being totally serious.</p>
<p>That’s an easy one, linguistics.</p>
<p>That’s really interesting! I agree with idad, linguistics is definitely a good choice. Foreign languages in general are definitely important, and computer science isn’t a poor choice either. I’m not sure about CIA recruitment in UChicago directly, but I do know that the CIA is trying to expand its employment opportunities (or maybe it was the FBI, but I imagine that most government agencies are trying to expand), so I imagine that it wouldn’t be too difficult getting a job/internship at the CIA.</p>
<p>I have known four people who worked for the CIA at some point. One was a Yale economics PhD who specialized in Chinese trade issues. One was a Penn PhD student in Central Asian history. The third was an Operations Research PhD student at Berkeley. The fourth was a lawyer. I also knew someone who worked for the OSS – he had been a graduate student in linguistics, and when World War II was about to break out he was one of only a handful of literate American citizens who knew any Micronesian languages, which all of a sudden were looking mighty strategically important. I imagine a few years ago knowing Pashto or Turkmen was a hot ticket, or one of the dialects of Arabic they don’t teach in school.</p>
<p>I would bet anything they have a web page that talks about how to get hired.</p>
<p>The days when people recruited each other out of Skull & Bones or Porcellian are long gone, and I doubt that ever happened at Chicago anyway (too many Not Our Sort of People).</p>
<p>thanks for the responses. so uh anyone else?</p>
<p>This may help:</p>
<p>[The</a> University of Chicago Magazine](<a href=“http://magazine.uchicago.edu/0602/chicagojournal/operation.shtml]The”>The University of Chicago Magazine)</p>
<p>is there a criminology course or anything in this field for undergrads?</p>
<p>Focusing on analytics, there are four big branches to the intelligence community. </p>
<ol>
<li><p>“Hard target” languages (Korean, Arabic, Russian, etc.) </p></li>
<li><p>Math / computer science / engineering </p></li>
<li><p>Area studies. </p></li>
<li><p>Military intelligence </p></li>
</ol>
<p>As an undergraduate, the areas that hire are the first two. For area studies / military intelligence, elite PhD’s and MA’s with considerable work experience are so woefully underutilized by the market that they can snap them up on the cheap (e.g. 65K for a Stanford PhD in Russian history). </p>
<p>Unfortunately, the problem with hard target languages is that they can rarely be learned to the necessary degree of proficiency by a non-native speaker. For tongues like Farsi or Mandarin, even two years of direct immersion leaves you sounding like a bumbling high schooler at best, the village idiot at worst. </p>
<p>So that pretty much leaves the sciences, which UChicago is definitely a target for. I know several UChicago classmates who are now with the National Security Agency in math and cs related capacities. </p>
<p>FYI: the CIA recruits on campus though, including running an afternoon of mock analysis. There hires tend to be a bit more hush-hush about their work. </p>
<p>.</p>