20-year-old Monika Benesh is from Hamburg and is an intelligence major at Mercyhurst College in Erie, Pennsylvania.
A recent assignment for the college’s Center for Intelligence, Research, Analysis and Training, turned into something much bigger for her.
“My group wanted me to make a document about Russian planes, for example, how to tell if it’s a civilian plane versus not,” Benesh said. “And my boss is like, ‘OK, you have free reign, do whatever you want.’”
She ended up building a 98-page database of all the information she could find from open-source material on Russian military and civilian aircraft. She said she couldn’t find any place where they were all compiled together like how she had done — so she thought it might be useful to the U.S. military. She offered up her research to an Army representative at her college.
The next day, she got an email saying the Army wanted to publish her entire document on OE Data Integration Network.
“Holy cow,” Benesh said she thought to herself when she opened the email. “I was in class. I was like about to take a final, and I just got that big news and I started shaking with excitement.”