After years as an international finance professional, Marjorie Ucros decided to go back to school and finish her business degree in 2008.
She never imagined that one day she’d be part of a team of people pulling together the United States’ daily presidential brief — a summary of high-level information and analysis on national security produced for the president and key cabinet members and advisers.
Her journey began at FIU. While working full-time at the United Bank of Switzerland in Miami during the day, she took classes at the university. It was not easy to juggle it all, but she made it work.
She graduated in 2010 with a dual degree in business administration and international business and management. Then, she moved to Washington, D.C., and took a job at the United Nations as a finance business manager. In that role, she worked with a number of donors, international governments and private sector organizations to enable initiatives that would reduce poverty in the Caribbean and South America.
As part of her job, she created a network of contacts in D.C. who eventually suggested she make a career switch — into the intelligence community (IC). The IC is a group of separate government intelligence agencies and subordinate organizations that work separately and together to conduct intelligence activities that support the foreign policy and national security of the United States.
The idea intrigued her.
“I decided to apply my skills and knowledge to support my adopted country,” says Ucros, a native of Venezuela.
Today, Ucros is an intelligence officer at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which provides timely, relevant and accurate geospatial intelligence in support of national security objectives. Through a program that allows professionals in the IC to rotate to different agencies for a time, she is currently working as a mission coordinator at the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI).
In her role at NCTC, she collects and disseminates talking points for National Security Council meetings, works with analysts and helps create the daily presidential brief, a document that has been presented in some form to U.S. presidents since 1946.
“Every day I go to work, and I know that I do make a difference in the overall intelligence mission,” she says. “There [are] specific tasks that go into the larger picture of protecting our nation.”
She encourages diversity and inclusion throughout the IC through her participation in its Hispanic Advisory Council, a network made up of people from all the agencies in the IC who come together to learn from each other, mentor each other and discuss ways to combat low representation of Hispanic, Asian and other minorities in the IC.
Ucros is proud to know that her alma mater is helping diversify the field, particularly through the IC-CAE Intelligence fellowship.
Led by the Jack D. Gordon Institute for Public Policy, the fellowship is a one-year workforce development program that provides undergraduate and graduate students the opportunity to prepare for a future in any of the 17 agencies of the U.S. IC. FIU was one of four pilot institutions designated as an IC-CAE school by the ODNI in 2005.
The program provides unique coursework, research opportunities, internships, one-on-one mentorship with former intelligence professionals and exclusive networking events with recruiters and other current members of the intelligence community.
In addition to the internships given to students during the program, roughly 80% of students receive a conditional offer of employment right after completing the program.
“Every one of us has something to contribute to national security,” Ucros says. “Everyone has skills they can develop and become [an] expert at it. It’s an incredible opportunity, it makes it more reachable to have a program like this within FIU.”
During the fall semester, students also participated in the Cyber Threat Intelligence Fellowship at FIU, working in Washington, D.C. and taking a course at FIU in DC, the university's hub in the nation's capital.
The Honorable Avril Haines, director of ODNI, visited FIU last year and highlighted the existing talent and interest in bringing FIU students into the IC.
Most recently, Stephanie La Rue, chief of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at the ODNI, visited the university to meet with students and discuss diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. La Rue emphasized the importance of building an IC that represents the country as a whole and how FIU’s workforce development programs are helping achieve that goal.
“Programs like this. People, officers, educators and mentors like you all have here [at FIU]. You are part of the solution to make sure that we do have an intelligence community that reflects a country that we’re here to serve,” she said to students. “The American people deserve an intelligence community that reflects our country.”
Alumni like Ucros are already making a difference.