“I wish someone had told me to think about my strengths and weaknesses. Have a hard conversation with yourself. Really evaluate what you’re good at, and what you’re not good at, so you can spend the rest of your professional life maximizing your strengths and minimizing those weaknesses.”
-- Valerie Plame, former CIA covert operations officer and author of the New York Times best-selling memoir, "Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House," which was released as a major motion picture of the same name starring Sean Penn and Naomi Watts.
“I wish someone had told me to get more life experience. If you think you want to go into the intelligence field, and you first get rejected, think of it as an opportunity to get more life experience and go do something you can’t do when you have a real job. Go to Europe with a backpack, go out into the world.”
-- Mary Beth Long, founder and chief executive officer of Metis Solutions, who previously served as a CIA covert operations officer and the assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs.
Plame and Long, both 1985 graduates of Penn State, addressing students at the Penn State School of International Affairs on “Careers in the Intelligence Field” Monday afternoon (Oct. 26) at the Lewis Katz Building. The two former CIA officials were at Penn State's University Park campus for a meeting of the School of International Affairs’ advisory board.