David Petraeus M.P.A. ’85, Ph.D. ’87, Commanding General of the Multi-National Force - Iraq, is featured in the May issue of Fortune magazine for a special section titled, “The best advice I ever got.”  Petraeus’ commentary is part of a series in which leading figures from a wide array of fields – government, the military, Wall Street, technology, and entertainment – discuss the advice they received that most influenced their lives.

In his feature Petraeus credits his commanding officer in the 1980s for encouraging him to pursue graduate school.  “After attending the command and general staff college at Fort Leavenworth, I went to the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton, where I got a Ph.D. in international relations,” Petraeus stated.

He continued, “I found the truth in those years about what [my commanding officer] occasionally described as ‘the grindstone cloister’ existence of military officers, that we keep tend to keep our noses to the grindstone and don't look up as often as we might,” such as interacting with experts and students outside the military.

At Princeton and WWS, Petraeus discovered, “The bottom line is that seriously bright folks thought very differently about important issues, and the debates on various topics were wonderful. All in all, in fact, the experience was invaluable.  It may sound trite, but experiencing that not everyone saw the world at all remotely the same was good preparation for many of the experiences I've had since then.”

In addition, Petraeus notes that the School enabled him to gain a basic understanding of such subjects as political philosophy and economics. “That background provided knowledge that helped here in Iraq in the beginning and also when I was in Haiti and Bosnia,” during peacekeeping operations, Petraeus said.

In closing, Petraeus stated, “Finally, grad school also gives most folks a healthy dose of intellectual humility. That was certainly the case for me, and that's not a bad thing either.”