What participants say.

With my background in finance, I am used to making data-driven decisions. This was a completely different task and allowed me to work on my strategic thinking with qualitative information.

What stood out was that some of the most valuable insights came from people who challenged the dominant view. It showed me that having different perspectives is not a distraction. It actually improves the quality of thinking.

The simulation reinforced an idea that my background tends to underweight: structuring the thinking process can be more valuable than just producing an output quickly. My goal is that in future roles, I will focus on producing a strategy to overcome any issue, rather than quickly jumping to solve the problem.

Every time we got a new set of documents and reread the old documents the more clear our analysis became and the more things seemed to make sense.

This class and this simulation have shown me how to best approach different projects with the same team. We truly do work better together as a team, and all this time spent together has allowed us to lean on each other and into each other's strengths.

This experience clarified what it means to operate with a team-oriented mindset in a high-stakes, competitive environment. The experience challenged me to think beyond my own responsibilities and pay closer attention to how the group functions as a whole.

How our team was able to react to our negative start and continue to grow our score each round showed how a team can continue to produce better outputs when we tackle our assignment in a way that lets us compete and debate one another until we can come to an agreement.

I see myself applying these lessons as someone who is really interested in targeting. I think this experience was foundational to my future career.

Network Analysis is extremely useful when assessing criminal syndicates. All sources of intelligence must be brought together during the investigation to ensure that tactical and strategic teams are aware of the situation, that targets are prioritized properly, and that intelligence is not acted upon until a hub is identified.

I am an International Relations and Diplomacy major. I'd love to work in Intelligence. Analyzing social networks will be vital to my career in many contexts.

Link analyses could be important in any security and intelligence job, specifically when understanding who you need access to in a network to influence it and a specific person. Being able to identify roles such as a gatekeeper vs. a personal connection, and how each player may be utilized differently, is core to getting results in an intelligence scenario.