IA Alumni Spotlight featuring Elena Akers
Professional Development Event Reflection
25 January 2020, 7:00pm-8:00pm, Zoom Meeting
For this meeting, we connected with IA alumna Elena Akers, who graduated this past May and is currently working as a virtual intern with START, the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland. She is involved in a program that compiles and analyzes research on domestic radicalization in the United States. I wanted to attend this spotlight event because Elena was one of the teaching assistants for my IA Scholars Seminar last year, as well as one of my teammates on the triathlon club. She is someone I admire and whose academic and professional achievements I really look up to. Additionally, one of my favorite professors, Jeffrey Lewis, who taught my “Terror and Terrorism” course last year, has been involved with the START Center since 2007. Throughout the course, we often discussed various findings of the START center and I always found their research very fascinating. Since I really enjoy academia and research, and as a Security and Intelligence major, this is exactly the kind of internship I wanted to know more about. Elena gave interesting insight into the work she does for them as well as the process of seeking out and applying to these types of internships.