Melissa Sutherland

"My entry into the intelligence community was as a Marine Corps Signals Intelligence Officer, where I led ground electronic warfare teams and developed “at the edge” intelligence architectures, to include supporting combat operations in Iraq. I continued my intelligence career working as a government employee leading a Joint Experimentation and Engineering lab in support of the Joint Combatant Command Joint Intelligence Operations Center implementation."

"One time I flew to this remote area in California to pitch to a client that was skeptical of a technical approach we were implementing. I thought I would be speaking with one guy, their lead engineer, so I had an engineering book with my architecture diagrams ready to pitch to him alone. Not to mention my senior partner had accompanied me on the trip to engage in other client dialogue and due to schedules joined the meeting. When I arrived, I saw a room with about 30 people in it. My immediate thought was ‘I am in the wrong place,’ but no, this was the room. I had 30 people hovering over this book and asking questions about it and no briefing deck. The pitch went great and resulted in both client adoption and funding along with positive engagement with the senior partner, who, incidentally, later helped sponsor me for promotion."

"The top issue will continue to be how we infuse technology across the multi-domain infrastructure to fuse multi-intelligence (INTs) and classified/unclassified data to ensure we maintain the mission/decision advantage."

"I believe the key to being successful is to network, network, network. Make sure you have sponsors and mentors to help you navigate the agency or company culture. Get a “top ten”—a group of ten people who can help with different aspects of your career. Many of my top ten are the same from when I started my career, and that just shows how important it is to build your peer network early on.

Also, I think there’s a lot of value in the term “Carpe Diem,” ... seize the day. Enjoy the moment. Don’t be so focused on what’s next. Just appreciate the time for what it is. Don’t let the present experience pass you up being too anxious to get back to other things."

Favorite Outside Interest: I love hanging out with my family at our cabin or doing something fun with my six-year old son. I love hiking, biking, skate boarding, playing with Legos, Batman toys and playing video games, I’ve been skateboarding ever since I was a kid, and now that my son likes it, I get to live vicariously through him.