 After working in the Ford administration, with a desire to be "taken really seriously", Troia studied on scholarship at Oxford University, where she earned a combined bachelor's degree in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics, and was later conferred a master's as is convention in Oxford.Troia attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she studied nuclear weapons, China, and the Soviet Union for three years toward a Ph.D., but ended up as an "all but dissertation" case.The title of her unfinished thesis was "The Sino-Soviet nuclear confrontation of 1969 from the point of view of the Herman Kahn stepladder period of escalation".