Intelligence Matters.

I’m leading a double life.

No, no, this isn’t the superhero thing again. (Although, I haven’t encountered Nightpaver in weeks, thank God.) It’s a life of balancing your everyday unassuming desk job with a secretive side that involves top secret communications and clandestine activities. Financial analyst by day, undercover operative by, well, also by day. These sides of me are intertwined to the point where I don’t know if I should thank the café staff for lunch or just shoot the cook. What am I really up to? That’s for me, the Laptop of Foom, and the wall to know. That’s right.

I’m a grad student.

Not just any grad student, mind you. A grad student who has taken on a task of epic proportions. (I’m talking epic, man. Like Spartacus epic, not Troy epic.) My cohort is currently enrolled and enthralled my MBAD 230: Marketing Management. In my opinion, this course should have been a cake walk – I was a marketing major, after all. And my prediction is at least partly true. All of the materials we have covered in my recently-purchased textbook is as familiar to me as the entire dialogue to Cool Runnings. Now if it wasn’t for that other pesky little “in-class project.”

GW has been tabbed by a company called edVenture to participate in a real-time marketing project. (Real-time means all the time.) Our job is to market the objectives of the selected client to the GW campus, as a means of market research for the client to use elsewhere for this demographic. For example, a class two years ago was partnered with General Motors to promote the ugliest SUV of them all, the Pontiac Aztek. I figured this seemed like a much more interesting task that stats homework, and so when the professor asked for two volunteers to be the coordinator between the class and the client, I raised my hand. Hey, I can organize a campaign to promote an ugly car, no problem. Where’s the twist?

Ah yes, the twist. ‘Tis no car we’re marketin’, laddie. ‘Tis the C.I.A.”

Yes, the Central Intelligence Agency. They’re the client that I took responsibility for on behalf of the class. What does this mean for Double-Oh-Condon? Well, I’ve got to pull of the convincing of the GW campus that the C.I.A. is an employer of choice for graduates. This still can’t be hard, can it?

Top 10 Reasons It Still Can Be Hard

1. We’re not allowed to do any press releases about the CIA, thanks to a recent federal crackdown of information dissemination. Thanks, Office of Public Affairs!
2. Jack Ryan is not in our class, and besides, he keeps changing what we looks like. Alecrisson Forffleck?
3. This is a 15 week project crammed into our 7 week timeframe. It’s like trying to fit a loaf of bread into a mayonnaise jar, and expect a perfectly normal sandwich.
4. We’re marketing to people who want to become spies. You know how hard it is to have spies as target market? Standard flyers and posters will not suffice. Chalk markings on mailboxes, now that’s how you market to a spy.
5. The GWU-Foggy Bottom area of DC – not a single mailbox.
6. Oh, that’s right. We all have FULL-TIME JOBS. My co-coordinator insists a project of this magnitude would take a normal marketing agency three months to put together a campaign of this scale. Sigh.
7. I only know of 2 people from GW who read this blog. Not exactly marketing to the masses.
8. We need to positively promote the Agency, while all of the guys up top are jumping ship. It’s a good thing college kids don’t read the newspaper these days.
9. I think big picture – it’s hard for me to do things in a limited or smaller role. It’s like when I was 6 and my dad thought I should sort my baseball cards. He was thinking I should sort them into teams, not by team in order of past year’s finish, alphabetically by position with extra detail paid to rookies and guys named Roenicke.
10. I’d tell you, but then I would have to kill you.