Monday, May 08, 2006

Georgetown SSP

Okay, someone got here because of I mentioned the Security Studies Program at Georgetown. Here is my take on it. Excellent program, great professors and great students. Like any MA you need some self-direction. Those that are happiest tend to be full timers as they can take advantage of more on-campus presentations and more time with fellow students. You also need to be aggressive in getting intel on the courses you like. If you do that, much joy will follow. Whenever I look at the new course list, I sigh a little. I never had the chance to take a Michael Scheuer class on Al Qaeda for example.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

OK, so I agree that on the surface you "missed out" by not taking Scheuer's class, but in truth you didn't miss anything except some insights into the pathologies resulting when really smart people live for too long inside bureaucracies. Mike is a super-smart guy, and knows AQ, but he is out of his realm teaching graduate classes and knows almost nothing about the larger national security context in which counter-terrorism and intelligence takes place. Nice guy, but not up to Georgetown standards.

Tripp said...

Well that makes me feel better. To be fair, my better professors tended to be from the academic rather than the practitioner side. The strong ones from the practitioner side usually had a strong academic background as well.