Nick Norberg ’12

In less than a decade since graduating from the Prep, Nick Norberg has certainly put together an impressive resume. Since receiving his undergraduate degree from Georgetown University in 2016, Norberg has become an expert on the Middle East, earned a master’s degree from Harvard University, studied Turkish and Arabic and, for the past three years, has worked to combat international and domestic extremism, first with the New York District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and soon at the State Department. This is certainly not the career path he envisioned when starring on the Prep stage as a member of the Cape and Sword Drama Society and thinking about pursuing a career in theatre.

 

“Mr. (Tony) Braithwaite ’89 and the other adults at Cape and Sword always used to say, ‘if a career in the arts was the only thing that would make us happy, then follow the arts, but if you have something else, by all means pursue that,’” Norberg says with a laugh.

 

For Norberg, that other interest became the study of Arabic and Turkish. He first pursued Arabic thanks to the guidance of former Prep history teacher Mr. Joe Daniels ’90, who tutored him after school in elementary Arabic and encouraged his study of the language. He continued that study at Georgetown where he majored in Linguistics and minored in Arabic and Turkish. 

 

After college, Norberg was selected to be a Fulbright Scholar to teach English in Turkey, but political circumstances led to the program’s cancellation. Instead, he moved to Seattle to work for Dataminr, a tech company that offers breaking news analysis, as a Middle East and North Africa analyst. After a year there, he decided he needed to supplement his language skills by studying the history of the modern Middle East, so he went to Harvard to pursue a master’s degree in Middle Eastern Studies.

 

This led him to Manhattan’s DA Office, where he worked as a Senior Counterterrorism Analyst, offering support to the prosecutors working cases involving international and domestic terrorism.

 

“I served as a subject matter expert informing prosecutors on the histories and ideological backgrounds of groups and individuals using terror tactics to pursue political agendas, ” says Norberg. “These cases are much more complicated than the typical violent crime cases.”

 

While at the DA’s office, he expanded his knowledge base to include domestic extremist organizations. “When I got the job, I was hired for my language skills to work on FTO (Foreign Terrorist Organization) and Terrorist Recruiter Cases,” he says. “While I was getting my bearings, I became increasingly interested in the domestic terrorist caseload, which included an increasing number of ‘Racially and Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists.’ I wanted to learn more about those movements so I volunteered to work on those cases.”

 

Norberg credits his ability to learn on the job to the education he recieved at the Prep. “The Prep’s whole educational model gave me the skills to do that,” he says. “It was invaluable in college, it was invaluable in grad school, and it was invaluable in my work in the DA’s office. There was an intellectual grit that we learned. I had classmates in college who would encounter a difficult class or problem and would give up sooner than I would. That’s how I was able to learn Arabic and Turkish, that’s how I was able to conduct archival research as a historian, and that’s how I was able to quickly absorb the information necessary to work on domestic extremism cases.” 

 

Though he loved his experience at the New York DA (“it was a great place to work”), he knew that he wanted to work for the federal government, and applied to and was accepted into the Presidential Management Fellows Program, which fast-tracks qualified individuals into management positions in various government agencies. His current position in the State Department, working on counterterrorism, came through the program and his making dozens of contacts. “The best advice I received on the job hunt came from cold calls and informational interviews with total strangers,” he says. “The Prep gave me the tools to be creative in my approach to the job hunt and to be receptive to the advice of others. Luckily it worked.”

 

Norberg credits the Prep with his success and ability to learn languages. “The Classics program was another big thing for me,” says Norberg, who thought that he was terrible at languages prior to coming to the Prep. “I took Latin for three years and Greek for three. The linguistic skills you receive, the systemic learning that you get, and being forced to learn Latin to a relatively high level, were all extremely valuable and transferable. It served me very well, especially when I went into a college-level Arabic course. Being introduced to a complex series of rules, I knew I could get it and I don’t think I would have done that if I didn’t have great Latin teachers who encouraged me to keep going.”