Headline Archives |
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FUTURE AGENTS IN TRAINING |
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09/09/08 | |||||||||||||
The program, now in its second year, is a weeklong summer camp based at our Washington Field Office and is designed to provide a fun, hands-on experience for students 16-18 years of age interested in FBI career opportunities.
“It has been a phenomenal success,” says Joseph Persichini, Jr., Assistant Director in Charge of our Washington Field Office who was instrumental in creating the program and hopes it will serve as a “pipeline for youth into the FBI.” Persichini says he was very impressed with the teens who participated, citing their intelligence and high level of motivation at a relatively young age. The course is a “fantastic opportunity” for such focused young people, he adds. Rocco Settonni is a good example. When the 16-year-old from Cleveland, Ohio read about the summer program on our website, he informed his mother that he was going to apply and that he had every intention of being accepted. “He was going to make it happen come heck or high water,” his mom Margie recalls. “Rocco is a determined young man.” “My personal career goal is to work as a special agent, focusing on intelligence/counterintelligence or counterterrorism,” Rocco wrote in a 500-word essay required as part of the competitive application process. He explained that to reach his goal of one day becoming an agent, he was also “very willing to learn to speak Farsi, Pashtu, or any other language vital to the defense of the United States.” Elliott Styles, a high school sophomore from Baltimore, Maryland, wrote in his essay: “Basically what I really hope to achieve from this program is to learn the everyday life of an FBI agent.”
By giving young people a realistic look at how the FBI operates, the Future Agents in Training Program is “planting a seed” for the future, Persichini says. And if 30 or 40 students participate every summer and go back to their friends, families, and communities to talk about the positive experience they had, everyone benefits. “If that one week changes their lives, reinforces their commitment to the FBI or to public service in general,” Persichini says, then the program “is worth its weight in gold.” Check the FBI Jobs website in the spring of 2009 for information on next year’s program. |