Alexandra Fleming '12 Attends The Washington Center Seminar

The Washington Center offers academic seminars and opportunities year-round for college students to intern in substantive and responsible positions in the nation's capital and offers summer opportunities to intern abroad. The internship program serves over 1,500 students each year.

In May of 2010, Alexandra Fleming '12 was able to participate in The Washington Center's Seminar Top Secret: Challenges to National Security in a Global Society. The seminar explored "the evolving international security environment; the effects of increasing globalization, technological advances, and demographic shifts; the tradeoffs and tensions that have and will emerge as the United States and other countries grapple with immediate national security threats and long-term security challenges; the important role of non-state actors and networks in a global society."  (Provided by The Washington Center)

Fleming says, "If not for being used to rigorous reading assignments in my politics classes I would probably have been entirely unprepared for the workload of this seminar. Another very helpful thing was being used to an intense course schedule of the same class each day, for several hours each day."

"Prior to this seminar I was dead-set on going into the intelligence community, but the panel of NCTC employees made me rather less interested in that. Their descriptions of everyday life in the IC made it sound much less interesting than I originally thought it must be. This is not altogether a bad thing, because there are still jobs in the IC that I’m interested in other than analyst, so that may still be what I end up doing. Primarily, though, this seminar made me more interested in the academic side of national security; for instance doing research for policy propositions."