News

Students Simulate Evacuation from Bahrain for Intelligence and Security Careers Week

September 30, 2026

The search for a future career path and promising job prospects can become a nagging worry in the back of many Wahoos’ minds. While important, it tends to get lost in to-do lists filled with readings, papers, and group projects that students manage over the course of a semester. However, from September 14 to 18, UVA students had the opportunity to not only put career planning front and center, but also learn about an exciting, secretive, and often opaque field.    

Intelligence and Security Careers Week is an annual series of events hosted by the UVA Career Center in collaboration with the Batten School and its National Security Policy Center (NSPC). 2026’s edition offered a week full of chances for students interested in the national security sector to talk to practitioners in the intelligence community, ensure their resumes are intelligence career-worthy, and get a taste of what a potential career in this field looks like. 2026 programming included talks on how to navigate the clearance process, a CIA information session, and a full-day career fair where students could talk to potential employers. While the entire week was valuable to students seeking to better understand the career field, the NSPC had the privilege of hosting one of its most interactive and impactful events: a crisis simulation.  

Held each year, the crisis simulation allows students the chance to take on the roles of leaders in the United States’ national security apparatus, dealing with a rapidly developing crisis as it unfolds. It forces them to confront what they do and do not know, utilize the skills they have been learning in class, and actually see if a high-pressure intelligence or security career appeals to them in practice.  

This year, the NSPC put together a fictional crisis based on current events in the Middle East, focused on the ongoing conflict between the U.S. and Iran. The topic was an evacuation from Bahrain that required students to strategize and execute the withdrawal of Americans from the region. Students were assigned to one of five groups: Department of State/US Embassy, CENTCOM (Central Command), National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), National Security Agency (NSA), and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Within each group, students had to discuss the role of their agency in this type of crisis and decide how to respond at various steps during the evacuation. Then they had to attempt one of the most challenging and important feats in the national security sector: convincing other agencies to agree with them and follow their lead. “We watched the students struggle with the concepts initially, but by the end of the exercise they were full engaged and acting as if they were part of their assigned agency” said one of the four UVA Masters of Public Policy candidates who helped design the exercise.  

Over the hour-long simulation, students debated one another, executed agency-specific actions, and responded to real-time updates during the crisis. While the simulation was a simplified version of how events might unfold in the real world, it gave students unfamiliar with the national security sector a better overall grasp of the forces at play. “Students seemed to walk away from the simulation with a better understanding of what people actually do in the intelligence community” remarked another MPP candidate central to its creation. In the end, the students successfully evacuated all the Americans left in the country, gaining insight into the roles different agencies play and how they collaborate in the process.