VMI

Great article on VMI in the WP today:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy...1403971.html?hpid=artslot&sid=ST2009101403983

Just_A_Mom said:

Great article on VMI in the WP today:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy...1403971.html?hpid=artslot&sid=ST2009101403983

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Thanks JAM: this was a very good article- I will have to save this as it will be useful when I am pitching VMI to the local high schools. I have to say that Gen Peay has done a remarkable job of infusing a new vision, sense of purpose and professionalism into all aspects of VMI. I am convinced that it is a much superior school to the VMI I went to more than 30 years ago. Although every alumnus and virtually every first classmen I have ever met insists that they were the last ones to have it tough- I think that many aspects of VMI are more difficult than it was then, and the things that have disappeared were mostly things that should have gone by the wayside with the end of the Civil War. Now if only my son stays off confinement and Penalty tours thru the end of the weekend so we can see him for Parents Weekend this weekend!!

I can't believe someone raped a girl there, that's crazy.

But changing the physical req to one measly pull up for girls?? A girl who can't do five pull ups has another thing coming if she thinks she can make it at VMI. I mean for real?! I know skinny girls that can do 20+, it's really not that hard

I don't know. My daughter passed the Army PFT while she was at Norwich this summer, push ups included, but she has a lot of trouble with pullups. That's because she is tall with long arms, and even though she is not at all heavy (she runway models), it's tougher for anyone with very long arms, women or men, to do pullups.

Maybe it runs in the family. I have long arms for my height, too, and when I took the physical aptitude test for USMA three-odd decades ago, pullups were by far my weakest performance.

TurkishRunner said:

But changing the physical req to one measly pull up for girls?? A girl who can't do five pull ups has another thing coming if she thinks she can make it at VMI.

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I would highly recommend that you watch your attitude and how posts like this might come across. You have not even signed the matriculation book yet; you have no right to say whether or not anyone else can make it at VMI. You don't know what it takes to make it at VMI other than what you've been told.

TurkishRunner said:

I can't believe someone raped a girl there, that's crazy.

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It is very unfortunate (especially for her), but it's a sign of the times. My sister went to the University of Cincinnati, and there was one situation I know of where a man and a woman were shot in their apartment two streets down from where she lived. I felt safer at VMI than I would have on probably any other college campus in the US.

To my knowledge, this article is the first time the incident made national news. VMI was spared the negative press coverage faced by some of our sister service schools because GEN Peay and the rest of the administrators handled it properly. As soon as she reported the incident, they called the police and the Commonwealth Attorney. The following Monday or Tuesday, GEN Peay sent out a letter to everyone on Post explaining the allegations (without releasing names, of course!) and letting everyone know that the proper authorities were handling it. There was no need for a huge smear campaign on the part of the media because there wasn't even an appearance of an attempted cover up.

On that note, if anyone has any questions about women at VMI, feel free to hit me up. I spent four years there and I compeleted an undergraduate research project on the process VMI undertook to go coed.

Jackie M. Briski '09