Every profession has a purpose. Degrees related to healthcare make you a medical expert, and degrees in finance make you a financial professional. When it comes to protecting and serving your country, homeland security is available for you. Looking after your home doesn’t require you to join the military actively. There is so much you can do on native soil. After all, the threats you wish to fight don’t simply loom on the battlefield alone.
These can be online, within the civilian population, or a person across the border. However, you must exercise your vigilance and stealth to make a move in all these cases. Curious to know what careers wait for you? Read on:
- Emergency management
Emergencies don’t just refer to natural disasters. Those also come under the scope of your career. These also include deliberate attacks to spread fear in the form of bombs or shootings. In both cases, civilian lives are under threat and need you to step in to secure and protect them. As an emergency management professional, your job is to assess the situation, deduce the risks, and act accordingly. It would help if you also had a high level of coordination to ensure your team could penetrate through the disaster and recover people.
Therefore, with an online masters in homeland security, you’re better positioned to train personnel, create a plan, and delegate resources. You will also have to collaborate with various organizations such as rescue shelters and public health officials to help people find safe and clean food and water to drink. You’re not simply here to remove the source of danger alone. You also need to ensure people are recovering. You can provide services that can help rebuild infrastructure, contain biohazards that can cause infections, and evacuate the population from areas that can no longer stand on their own.
- Border patrol
Border patrol is a complex process and one that requires your understanding of how immigration laws work on a federal and state level. As a border patrol agent, your job is to ensure that documented migrants who have no criminal background can safely naturalize in your country. But those who try to trespass, sell drugs, or are wanted criminals escaping the law need to get apprehended by you.
Depending on where you choose to go, you may be working in the Us customs and border protection. That is monitoring people coming and going from the US and scrutinizing their vehicles. Suppose you’re working in federal emergency management and immigration and customs. In that case, you will determine what exceptional circumstances allow you to grant people asylum in your country if they’re escaping from threat.
At the same time, when goods get imported and exported across state lines while working in transportation security administration, it is our job to check the license plate and match it with registered documents. You also have to ensure the vehicle is simply a transport medium and not hiding narcotics or people trying to get access to your country. Border patrol doesn’t require you to be on your feet all day.
You can also check if you need to exercise vigilance and what vehicles or people to look out for. When you finish your job, it is your responsibility to report back to headquarters. Your master’s degree in homeland security will come in handy since it teaches you all surveillance methods.
- Secret service
Politics is a tricky slope. Government officials who are inactive in power are always a target. Not everyone agrees with their policies and laws, making them prone to many high levels of security threats. As a secret service agent, it is your job to look after the President and the Vice President of the United States. You may also need to watch after correspondents in the White House to ensure everyone is safe. A degree, along with military training, is your biggest asset.
You should know how to recognize and disarm bomb threats, apprehend active aggressors and analyze online spaces to gauge where a person may attempt at government officials. It is also your job to survey situations and jump to action, whether in public or private gatherings. The responsibilities of a secret service agent also extend to banking, financial fraud, and credit card thefts since most criminals can use this information to adopt a new identity for themselves.
- Cybersecurity professional
Threats aren’t limited to the ground. You may also encounter them online. In such cases, you must protect your country by providing your intelligence in keeping online spaces secure. As a cybersecurity specialist, you may need extra credentials in IT since your work is primarily online. You need to ensure that government officials can do their work safely and securely online with no malware or virus attacking them. You also need to counter any attempts at hacking and ensure government lines, including military codes, stay secure. Your job also includes surveillance of civilians and picking out data on suspicious activity. If there is an active crime scene, your database can help match fingerprints and catch the person in charge.
Online spaces like Facebook, Twitter, and even certain websites get used for political commentary. However, since they get frequented by the public, you cannot allow fraudulent information, confidential videos, or scams to lurk in these spaces. At the same time, you cannot enable malicious videos to circulate online. Filtering content is essential in keeping the population safe too. Testing security parameters include a penetration exam, investigating the cybersecurity infrastructure you have placed online, and checking if your installed firewall is the latest version.
Conclusion
Protecting your country is both an honor and a privilege. While the armed forces do their job protecting you from ground threats and engage in active warfare, you too can play your part. There are many careers that you can explore depending on your interest. These include preventing emergencies by enrolling in disaster management and protecting civilians from natural or artificial threats. You can also look into border patrol and provide surveillance across state lines. If you wish to work with high-profile government officials, you should try joining the secret service. The online space can also use your expertise with fraudulent information and underground markets thriving in cyber spots. By becoming a cyber security professional, you can end these illegal exchanges.
