by Emilie Lewis
Graduating senior Annalise Morrison has wanted to be in the FBI since she was fifteen. During a family trip to Washington D.C. she saw a man in a black suit with a clear earpiece standing under the J. Edgar Hoover building and has been infatuated with the image ever since.
Now graduating from Columbia College with a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice and her crime scene investigation certificate, Morrison has a yearlong internship with the FBI under her belt and a career with the Bureau waiting for her.
“It really still hasn’t sunk in,” Morrison said about her selection to receive one of the few, fully paid honors internships offered yearly by the FBI. “I think it hasn’t because every day is something new, something you just have to remind yourself ‘this is what I’m doing.’”
Morrison chose Columbia College because of the criminal justice program and her family ties to the school where her father was once a professor. “I felt this really important tie to Columbia College since I was about five years old,” she said, also citing the value of a liberal arts education. “The things that I’ve learned at a liberal arts college are way better exposure for the real world than you might get at a larger university.”
For Morrison, it wasn’t just about the classes that would get her to her future career, it was the faculty she worked with along the way, specifically citing professors Mike Himmel and Dr. Barry Langford in helping her find her niche. “The professors at Columbia College are really, really interesting, they have all these different backgrounds which I think is really inspiring to see,” Morrison said.
And it was the different backgrounds and ideas brought into the classroom that helped Morrison prepare to work with the Bureau, she said. “Almost everything I learned in a school setting applied to the work setting,” Morrison said. She mentioned she really appreciated knowing “the legal jargon” in addition to fingerprinting and bloodstain analysis.
“I really felt like I learned something and that my education is really valuable and it just really reaffirmed that I was doing school for a reason, and that reason is so I could be here,” Morrison said.
The momentum built between her studies and internship haven’t yet stopped, leading her to a career with the FBI after graduation. “I don’t think it will ever stop really, I think I’ll always have one foot in the door somehow,” she said.
And the foot in the door started at CC where Morrison said she was allowed to be a “big fish in a pretty small pond.” Her involvement with the school varied from Student Ambassadors to the Presidential Advisory Board to the Student Activities Commission where she got to flex her leadership muscles as president two years in a row.
But the highlight of her college career was her honors internship, allowing her to fulfill the dream that started nearly ten years ago in Washington D.C. The FBI internship gave Morrison “a sense of belonging,” and was, in her words, “life affirming.”