Amber Stoesser
An undergraduate student at the University of Maryland, Amber Stoesser was a recent participant in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Scholarship and Fellowship Program, which is administered by the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE) on behalf of the DHS Science and Technology Directorate.
Stoesser, whose research topic was Curriculum Development for Terrorist Researchers, performed research at START (National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Response to Terrorism), a DHS Center of Excellence based at the University of Maryland.
Below is a question and answer dialogue about Anderson's experience at START. These same questions and answers can be seen in video format by clicking the link on the right side of the page.
Amber Stoesser
Please Describe the Program you are participating in.
The START Curriculum Development Program really seeks to collect resources for instructors who teach terrorism and counter terrorism courses currently here at the University of Maryland and potentially we're going to expand the program to other universities in the START consortium. We're also working on developing new programs for instructors at the University of Maryland and again potentially for instructors across the consortium.
Describe the Global Terrorism Database and how it is incorporated in your research.
It is currently the largest open-source database of terrorism incidents across the world, and we've really been working on including it in different instructional programs, but the really good thing about it is that it can be used across all different types of courses.
How has this experience made you grow as a student?
It's really taught me a lot about terrorism in general and specifically about the different components of educating responsibly about terrorism. So often students learn from the media and learn a lot of myths about it and it has been really, really interesting and really good for me as a student to learn about it first hand by using data and also by helping future generations of terrorism scholars learn about it in a responsible and educated manner.
How has it shaped your plans for your career goals?
It really has helped shape my career goals in that I will be starting full time here in the fall as the education assistant here at the university. I'll be furthering the curriculum development side but also I will be working on managing fellows and scholars like myself in the future, so it's been very exciting.
How does it feel to contribute to a project that is timely and is extremely relevant to our nation's security?
It's really, it's humbling in a sense to know that I've been working on this database and being able to teach students in such an important topic and a topic that will be important for the next x-many years. It's been a very humbling experience and been very rewarding at the same time to get to work on those factors and everything like that.
