People who work for the CIA, the NSA and other agencies concerned about national security get training on the job when hired, but the University of Virginia is giving students a jump start with a summer program at the Batten School of Public Policy and Leadership.
“We’re preparing students for careers in national security, which can take a lot of forms," says Philip Potter, Executive Director of the National Security Data and Policy Institute. "Our students end up doing humanitarian work with the UN. They end up doing policy work with the Department of Defense, foreign service officer work with the State Department, and some of them end up in the intelligence community.”
The institute works closely with the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Defense, Homeland Security and the State Department – supporting busy people who lack what students have.
“They have the time that even knowledgeable professionals don’t always have to dig into where’s the literature right now? What’s the future going to look like? Who are the experts I can talk to?”
This summer’s mission -- writing white papers on topics related to national security. Eli Beaubien, for example, looked into mining on the moon.
“There’s this whole world out there that is talking about technology focused on colonizing the moon, mining it, exploring it, using resources that you can bring back from the moon," Beaubien says. "Is this a risk that we want to take, or what are the implications if one of our adversaries gets to this resource before we do?
The program also explained what’s involved in getting security clearance from the federal government – a process Potter says is more like going to the DMV than being in a James Bond movie, and professors delved deeply into the role energy plays in keeping the country safe.
“I didn’t really think about how energy can be related to national security," Beaubien admits. "It just puts light on in our homes and allows us to run the dishwasher, but energy allows our country to run. It’s the crux of critical infrastructure, and if you lose your energy then you lose everything really, so there’s a huge importance to national security – trying to protect our energy, trying to optimize it.”
Student Cole Leis wrote about deep fake technology and foreign interference in U.S. elections. So far, he says, Congress has not passed laws to regulate in this area, but states are looking into it.
““Federal legislation doesn’t seem to be on the table," he explains. "It might be helpful to see what states come up with, and policymakers might benefit from taking a look at other countries and how AI has influenced elections elsewhere.”
And R.J. May studied advancements in Chinese AI.
“The Chinese company DeepSeek uses information from academic journals, from open-source code websites and their own internal team to build AI models that rival and sometimes surpass our own, and we saw in 2023 that DeepSeek came out of nowhere. It shocked the stock market for a bit, and we don’t want that to happen again," May says.
One key to DeepSeek’s success, he learned, was a comprehensive approach to developing AI models. He compared it to training for track and said U.S. companies were too narrow in their focus.
“America’s strategy when trying to beat China’s DeepSeek was being really fast but focusing on having the best shoes instead of the best coaches, the best raining schedule, the best diet and all the other inputs that go into training your model.”
Students presented their white papers to retired and current intelligence and policy professionals who gave them high marks. Graduates said they’d like to work in this field – one which seems to have escaped federal budget cuts for now.
The student white papers are available here.
