>> First of all you have to become an FBI agent.
You cannot go from getting a college degree or graduate degree into the BAU.
You have to first become an FBI agent which means you have to go
through the application process and you have to go through the FBI Academy training which,
now I think is about four and a half, maybe five months.
It's like a police academy, it's very stressful.
You have to complete that successfully and that's back here in Virginia
and then you get assigned to your field office.
The application process to be an agent requires
that you have a four-year college degree minimum but it can be in any major.
And what I tell young people is if your thing is not psychology
if it's not the social sciences just get a four-year college degree, that's what paramount.
And then you have that and you can work towards becoming an FBI agent.
But it takes about, and a lot of people don't realize this.
Once you become an FBI agent it takes maybe eight to ten years working as a street agent
to develop all that investigative experience and skill and then you can apply and for the BAU.
But you don't just jump from college to the BAU.
It takes your four-year college degree and as part of the original application process,
the FBI also requires that you have some professional work experience because they don't,
they want to hire people that have a certain level of maturity.
And then you go to the FBI Academy and then you work for ten years and then you apply
to be a profiler and then it's usually about a three-year training process to be a profiler.
It's a very, very long process but you don't have to have a psychology degree.
You don't even have to have a master's degree.
You just have to have a good starting foundation and get that college degree behind you
and then work towards those other milestones.
There are some general areas that I think would be helpful, not exclusively helpful
but I think would be helpful and certainly studying psychology, studying sociology,
international relations is another great area of study.
Counseling can be very helpful.
I also think that courses in journalism can be extremely helpful and courses in philosophy.
And the reason I say philosophy is that a great deal of what we do is analytical work.