Summer Games Profile: Helping Wargames Unfold in Real Time

A summer internship at a Fortune 500 company would be a dream come true for most ambitious, overachieving college students. But for those without much professional experience, it might also sound a little intimidating. 

If Leilani Porter had any such reservations going into her internship here at Booz Allen, she certainly didn’t by the end of it. “It was shocking in the best way,” she says. “Every person I’ve talked to has been incredibly helpful. They even recommended other people they thought I should connect with.”

Leilani, a rising senior at James Madison University (JMU), was one of nearly 450 participants in Booz Allen’s 2019 Summer Games internship program. Divided into five-person teams, participants are given 10 weeks to develop projects from concept to prototype. After many rounds of presentation, the most compelling project wins. 

Leilani and her teammates developed a voice-activated digital assistant for use in wargaming exercises—a critical planning tool for the U.S. military. “We’re designing it so that someone can give orders in colloquial terms, and those orders will instantly be reflected in the simulation,” she says. “Normally someone would have to take those orders down and process them into language the computer can understand. Our goal is to make that processing happen instantly and automatically so wargames can unfold in real time.”

Like her intelligence analysis major at JMU, the project combines Leilani’s central interests—pulling useful insights from huge quantities of data (in this case, the wargaming data used to teach a computer to interpret orders) and developing geospatial tools. “The core of what we’re doing is making it so you can tell something to move from one place to another, and it will do it,” she says. “We’re applying it to wargaming, but it could also be used for things like transporting goods or planning maritime routes.”

As floored as Leilani was by the support she received, she was also impressed with how much freedom she and her team were given. “We had the guidance you’d hope to have as an intern, but the freedom of an employee,” she says. “We had resources to turn to when we needed them, but were free to pivot our project in the directions that most interested us.”

Through serving as a developer on her project and constantly networking with experts, Leilani picked up a wealth of knowledge on coding, technology, and business. But the most valuable lesson she learned is one of Booz Allen’s core tenets—never go it alone. “It’s tempting to spend hours figuring out how to fix something on your own, but Booz Allen taught me to be more collaborative,” she says. “When you’re working next to an expert who can fix it in a heartbeat, it’s more efficient to just ask them to show you how.”