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Audra Herber |
An Unpredictable Career of Opportunities, Bad
Guys, and Public Service
Audra Herber
March 2006
Cool jobs, the lure of education, and a penchant for doing the
unexpected have kept Audra Herber's career on the move.
Now an information systems engineer in MITRE's Center for Integrated
Intelligence Systems (CIIS), Herber began her work life in the Army
Reserves while finishing dual bachelor's degrees in journalism and
Russian/East European Studies. It's an intriguing journey from there
to her current job advising the Naval Criminal Investigative Service
(NCIS) and her new rank as Lieutenant in the Navy Reserves.
The first bend in her career path came in 1993. After five years
at Eastern Kentucky University, and still not graduated, Herber
approached her father, an Army recruiter, saying, "I need to do
something different with my life." When he refused to put her into
the Army because he worried she lacked the proper motivation to
succeed, she declared she'd become a Marine instead. He relented
and for the next eight years she served the U.S. Army's 15th Psychological
Operations Battalion as a psychological operations specialist and
interrogator—the first of her "cool jobs." And she's been
doing something different with her life ever since.
After graduating, Herber "got lost on the way to the Bureau [FBI],"
where she was headed for a job interview. Instead, she stopped by
the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), and ended up taking
a job as an inspector. From there, a promotion led to special agent
status. While with the INS, she earned her first master's degree,
in international commerce. One of her mentors kept insisting that
she should have been an officer in the Army, and that she could
become one in the Navy Reserves by going for a direct commission.
By the time she eventually listened and had her interview with
the Navy Reserves, her husband had accepted an assignment in Germany
for Army Special Forces, and direct-commissioning someone in Europe
would have broken the mold. Nevertheless, after reaching Germany
in August of 2001, she received a document with a note: "Congratulations,
you're in the United States Navy Reserves."
Being first has its challenges, however, and one of those was finding
the right role for a member of a Chicago reserve unit so far from
home. With the help of a mentor, Herber kept her commission and
was assigned to the Navy Intelligence Reserve for Special Operations
Command-Europe in Stuttgart, Germany.
MITRE-Stuttgart
In Stuttgart, Herber also discovered MITRE, which led to another
unexpected fork in the road. There she was, "a GS-12 with a master's
degree and two bachelor's degrees and I couldn't get a job to save
my life." Through acquaintances, she learned that MITRE was looking
for a site administrative aide. "I went into the interview prepared
to turn the job down. I had just come from carrying a gun and busting
down doors—not exactly the standard admin/secretary type,"
she says. But her interviewer set the hook, telling Herber that
MITRE would pay for her to get another master's degree in computers.
"You've got your secretary," Herber replied.
After she earned her master's in management information systems,
she moved up to become the site's network administrator, where she
gained a reputation as a tough enforcer of virus protection and
security measures.
For one of her projects—involving a database repository for
classified information gathered by intelligence analysts—her
commendation from the Navy's European Command said, "Ms. Herber
succeeded where other experts had not been able to develop practical
solutions to this challenge." Herber took an existing system, eliminated
the cumbersome middle step of copying and pasting spreadsheet cells,
and simplified it so one click would populate the database directly
from the spreadsheet.
"We'd been told over and over again that we couldn't make this
work," she says. But they did, by reverse-engineering the entire
system and writing new program code.
"People at the sponsor's office didn't want me to leave," she says,
adding with a laugh that "they called me 'goddess' for doing the
impossible." More seriously, she says that revamping the database
saves thousands of man-hours and frustration.
MITRE-McLean
When her husband was reassigned to the States in mid-summer 2005,
Herber came to MITRE's McLean headquarters. She calls her new job
at CIIS "the perfect fit," completing the circle of her law enforcement
background, IT skills, and Navy experience. She believes wholeheartedly
in the NCIS-sponsored project she's supporting—Law Enforcement
Information Exchange (LInX)—which she calls "the Holy Grail
of law enforcement: to make all three levels of government [local,
state, and federal] talk to each other and work together."
The NCIS picked up the threads of the project, initially begun
by the FBI, experimenting with it in areas near large Navy bases.
The program is poised for a move from research and development into
something larger, and "there's a lot of excitement in the field
from the special agents and the local law enforcement officers,"
says Herber.
More hard science is the next educational goal for Herber, the
information systems engineer who hesitates to call herself that.
"I'm a liberal arts baby," she explains, "but that gives me a good
understanding of the users. I can talk to them and understand their
frustration totally."
In a way, she misses being a gun-toting, door-busting special agent.
But she loves her job. "I feel I have to be working for the public
good. That's why MITRE is such a good fit for me. I may not be chasing
down bad guys and catching criminals, but I'm doing something that's
in the public good for the United States."
—by Shari Dwyer
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