Anna Bieganowska is a undergraduate senior currently finishing her dual-degree in Criminology & Criminal Justice and Psychology while working as a Volunteer Intern at the Office of International Affairs (OIA) in the U.S. Department of Justice. In her role as Volunteer Intern, she assists law enforcement and prosecutor efforts in requesting evidence and the extradition of criminal fugitives from governments worldwide. As a first-generation immigrant from Poland who came to the United States just before starting school, with parents who could initially only speak Polish, Anna has found that her native language and culture and her passion for criminal law helped her as an intern. By keeping that native language alive, she now does short legal translations for extraditions from Poland. Most importantly, her criminal justice background coupled with an understanding of the Polish worldview lend her a firm grasp of legal and cultural differences that she can easily draw on to best represent the needs of U.S. police and prosecutors seeking assistance from their counterparts abroad.

Anna’s experiences as a CCJS major and experiences in Howard County and Prince George’s County police departments last year have well prepared her to excel as an OIA Volunteer Intern. Her experience as an Undergraduate Teaching Assistant for the Criminological Research Methods course at the University of Maryland, alongside coursework in criminal law and advanced writing, taught her the investigative and written communication skills to draft succinct analysis memoranda for OIA, gleaning information from disorganized and sometimes untranslated materials from foreign justice ministries. As an intern in the Howard County and Prince George’s County police departments, she learned how to create comprehensive work products to better inform the decisions of police executives, run queries in databases for in-house research questions, and track a large influx of cases. Equipped with this background, she quickly acclimated to the high case volume and time-sensitive assignments at OIA, and uses these technical and non-technical skills every day to better fulfill U.S. treaty obligations for mutual legal assistance and extradition with our foreign partners.

Anna plans to become an intelligence analyst after graduation and continue to support law enforcement at the federal level in her new home here in the United States.