My team with General Patreus after our presentation
I had the once in a life opportunity this year to present my team’s work in front of General David Patreus. While I’m super excited about what I’ve been working on for the last couple months and the presentation my team worked on for the General, given some of the operational data that was military specific to our project I can’t share our entire presentation.
So instead I was asked by the university to write about the lessons I learned as the outlier in the room. As a 19 year old it was amazing having this opportunity. Even more humbling was the fact I was the only undergraduate and student under 25 who was in the room, let alone in front of the general presenting.
Don’t Take the Criticisms Personally - Patreus is probably one of the most knowledgable men in the world when it comes to new and emerging technologies. When he thinks a team is not working on something useful he’s very blunt and straight forward about it, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. An example of this happened to the team presenting right before us. As soon as the deck was loaded onto the projector and even before the team could say a word, Patreus was very straight to the point. He told the team, which was working on detecting drones near AirCraft Carriers and creating a ML model to determine the certainty the drone was armed or had explosives, that he had just invested in a company that not only did the same thing better but also had a novel way of taking the drone down. I think the quote Patreus used to wrap the presentation up was pretty telling toward his approach which was “A good leader doesn’t keep the staff guessing when he knows the answer.” The meaning behind it was that General Patreus doesn’t have people reinvent the wheel to find out there is already a major problem with their approach.
Be Prepared and Confident - I think this is probably the biggest thing a lot of the teams really struggled with. One of the other team members after presenting literally told me that he felt the General smelling his nervousness before he even got out of his chair to present. After the first presenter on the first team who presented had his nerves get to him and forgot his presentation, all the presenters in the room definitely got a little bit more concerned. More importantly For me personally I was definitely the least qualified person in the room. All the other teams presenting had teams of 5 comprised of a mix of graduate and PHD students. Meanwhile team which was presenting only had 3 students including me, where I was an undergrad. But to be honest being under-qualified has really never stopped me from doing anything, and this was no different.
Stories are Helpful When You Have Data To Back up the Experience - I think the reason General Patreus really resonated with my team’s presentation was that not only were we able to share the stories of specific Marines who were facing the issue we were tackling, but because we were able to interweave the statistics and business intelligence that a lot more Marines were facing the exact same issue. One thing I really admired about the General was the fact he really prided himself about knowing the operational aspects and small details of the jobs the men he commanded. The second team that presented was working with the Air Force and State Department on Pattern of Life Data Analytics to help drone strike planners minimize civilian casualties. Patreus was able to bring up a lot of personal experiences of how small a lot of the screens were for the drone pilots, and how many times because there is not preset data on a drone strike location especially when the location is “hot.,” there needs to be multiple drones on station looking at multiple angles to best avoid civilian casualties. This kind of really spoke to the fact that even though General Patreus was really high up in the military, at heart he is still a soldier who identifies with the problems that normal soldiers face when doing their responsibilities.
Don’t be Afraid to Ask - One of the things I added to my bucket list after finding out I would have the opportunity to present in front of General Patreus was getting a photo with him to prove to my mom it actually happened. After Patreus was finished asking questions to my team and I (which was the last team presenting) I kind of saw my 5 second window to get around his entourage of suits who follow him and ask for a quick photo. To which he replied of course he would take a photo with my team. That’s actually how I got the photo for this blog entry, and how all the other teams presenting got their photos with Patreus. After the presentation a lot of other teams actually came up to me and thanked me for being brave enough to ask for the photo first, because that allowed them to come in after and get a quick photo. A little bit more on focus however was the fact my team was having trouble getting connected to a specific branch of the Pentagon which was helpful in our project. After Patreus was done asking a question on a related note, our team was very honest in where we were struggling getting connections to which he responded “speak to person X and tell him that David Patreus sent you.” That connection actually ended up being really helpful to our team.
In the end it was a really amazing experience. Our team got some amazing feedback which we are incorporating into our project for the US Marine Corps. The general’s comments for our group in specific was that he wanted us to expand our project focus from just a specific subsegment of the Marine Corps to all the different branches, and that kind of feedback from someone as experienced as General Patreus is the vote of confidence we need in order to think bigger.