On Thursday, February 27th, Michelle Printsev, an AITE alumni from the class of 2015, came back to AITE to speak to students. The crowd consisted of Westhill and AITE debate students. Printsev, who graduated from Yale and currently consults for the US Department of Defense, ran a workshop on International Relations. The presentation consisted of studies on how countries interact with one another and what they consider when making decisions based on national interest. The guest speaker even did a mock case planning in which the students created Government and Opposition arguments for the topic, “This House prefers Ukraine joins NATO”.
After her presentation, two reporters from the Rams’ Report caught up with her.
How did you come to the conclusion to become a consultant for the US DOD?
“Starting in AITE I became really interested in history. Debate, APUSH and AP Euro got me really interested about why things happen in the world stage, how they happen in the world stage. So I went to college, studied Economics and Political Science, took a lot of international relations classes, and sort of continued that journey. When the time came to choose a job…it just so happened that this company was hiring, and they pretty much wanted people to read about what’s going on in the world and then write about what it means for the U.S, and for me that was a continuation from what I was doing in school. I got to the job, and I never wanted to leave…it’s been five and a half years.”
How has debate been a core part of your life?
“Debate helped a lot with public speaking, logical reasoning, and argumentation. In debate, you have a limited amount of time to make a clear argument out of a disparate amount of facts. It’s kind of what I do with my job now.”
How did your experience at AITE influence your career path?
“When I came into AITE, I actually wanted to do math or science. All throughout middle school, I loved math, I loved rockets, I wanted to be the first person on Mars. Then I got here, and the best department by far, in my time, was the history department. So that pretty much pivoted me real hard into economics, political science, history, and that’s what I ended up studying throughout school and it’s what I ended up using now.”
Would you like to share any major accomplishments or milestones that you’ve achieved?
“There’s been a couple of times at work where I have felt that the research I did and the presentations I’ve made have directly influenced how some of our senior defense leaders think about the world, or think about specific issues in the world. And so, you have to do a lot of research, right? It doesn’t always mean that you have the absolute right answer, just because there are so many things that are uncertain, but it’s the feeling of knowing that you gave your leader more and better information, not just facts, but reasoning and analysis, that actually influenced policy in some way.”
