Thanks to Alec Cooper ’13, who was one of our Alumni guests for the Math Field Guide last Spring, we have an inside scoop on the hiring process for Mathematician and Statistician Interns at the National Security Agency!
The hiring process at the NSA involves a visit consisting of three to four hour-long interviews, an opportunity to present a seminar to an audience of Mathematicians and Statisticians and an evaluation by NSA Mathematicians and Statisticians, in addition to the processing required for a security clearance. Please note that:
- US citizenship is required
- A polygraph exam and background
Summer Internship deadline is October 15, 2017!
The Director’s Summer Program: Cryptologic Mathematicians for Exceptional Undergraduate Mathematicians – The Director’s Summer Program (DSP) is a highly competitive program that seeks to reach the nation’s most outstanding undergraduate mathematics majors. Each summer, we invite exceptional undergraduate students to put their problem-solving skills to the test in mathematics, cryptology and communications technology. These problems often involve applications of abstract algebra, geometry, number theory, analysis, probability, statistics, combinatorics, graph theory, algorithms, and computer science. State-of-the-art computing resources are available to all students. Computational algebra packages, including mathematics, MATLAB, Magma and MAPLE are available, in addition to a variety of statistics packages. The DSP is looking for students who have distinguished themselves in undergraduate research or national mathematics competitions. At the beginning of the summer, students are presented with introductory lectures on modern cryptography and a set of problems that agency mathematicians are actively investigating. Each student chooses one or two problems as the focus of his or her research. Throughout the summer, students are mentored by agency experts, collaborate to solve challenging problems, and present their work in both technical talks and papers, which are internally published at NSA.