Criminal Justice Major Looks Forward to Internship with U.S. Federal Air Marshals

When I first began searching for my internship at the beginning of this school year, I had no idea where to look. I searched through every posting on USAJobs hoping to find something, applied to one, but didn’t have very much luck. Just when I thought I had reached a dead end, I began talking to professionals in the field to see if they had known of anything or anyone that could help me.

Among the professionals I connected with was my supervisor from my internship the previous summer at the Paramus Police Department. Luckily, a friend of his worked for the Federal Air Marshal Service’s New York Field Office and was able to pass along my resume and contact information to the person in charge of their internship program. From that point on, I began searching for whatever I could find on the Federal Air Marshal Service and fell in love with the idea of working with them.

Prior to this, I hadn’t even really known about the Federal Air Marshal Service, but now it seems like the perfect fit for me and my career goals. I am a criminal justice major, and my goal is to eventually go into federal law enforcement. I had always pictured federal law enforcement agencies as the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Drug Enforcement Administration, etc. I had also always pictured law enforcement to be on the ground, but it also happens in the sky on planes, too. My internship site also fits very well with my lifestyle goals, as I really want to be able to travel, and many careers in law enforcement aren’t flexible and wouldn’t allow for that. As a Federal Air Marshal, traveling is built into your career.

My expectations for this internship this summer are very high being that I was so excited to get started with it. Being that I hadn’t known very much about the Federal Air Marshal Service before starting this internship, everything that I experience throughout the summer will be new to me. Within this experience, I hope to learn more about the Federal Air Marshal Service, what they do, why they do what they do, how the organization became what it is today, what their training is like, etc. I feel that I will gain a lot of new knowledge through this internship and have an in depth understanding of what this organization does and why. Ultimately, I want to better myself through this experience and see if this is a career path that I could see myself going down one day.

The Bergami Summer Internship Program is funded through the generosity of Board of Governors member – and former Board Chair – Sam Bergami ’85 EMBA and his wife, Lois, and the Division of Student Affairs. The students are blogging about the experience throughout the summer.