Hi all,
I am going to be starting college this fall with a type 2 AFROTC scholarship at the University of Maryland. I was wondering if this summer, my senior year, there is a program that I have to go through for ROTC or if my career starts at the beginning of school?
Thanks all!
Nate
Congrats, I've been up to UMD for a conference and that place is gorgeous, they have really well defined programs too (their foreign language flagship program for example is well worth checking out), specific dorms for different majors. I think I asked this but I don't remember if have dorms for ROTC cadets or not, worth checking into. AFROTC doesn't have a summer program before, but most Dets have some form of New Cadet orientation that takes place in the summer before school starts. Generally it's close enough to the time when all OOS students have arrived. Usually that's where you get to bring your parents and they tell you what AFROTC's all about, what you need to make sure you do before school starts, and have a Q&A with current cadets who consist of a good mix of upper and lower classmen so you can get a good variaty of perspectives. Then the future cadets leave their parents to continue questioning the cadets and cadre and go get weighted and measured and go fill out a bunch of paperwork, everyone gets to start making their own personnel file, there's more paperwork for scholarship awardees so you're there longer. Then it's over but you get to go stick around to ask more questions if you want.
This is how my Det does it at least, there's a lot of paperwork to get done so it would make sense to do that before school starts as opposed to taking up an entire LLAB to do it.
It was a good suggestion to try to take some transferable summer classes if you can, don't front load your first semester, there's still plenty of time to do that in the Spring, but 1st semester bad grades kill a lot of new cadets who are dealing with ROTC and difficult majors while taking 7 classes. Don't do that to yourself. Grades matter. If your grades suck, you can't stay in ROTC. Don't take that 2.5 scholarship minimum as a reason to have below a 3.0, you still need to be competitive to be selected to go to Field Training summer after your sophomore year. And AFROTC factors in grades you received from any credits you earned through dual enrollment or a summer community college even if UMD doesn't, so if you did well it will boost your gpa when you go up for and enrollment allocation (EA) to FT, if you do poorly it will bring down your grade. If you use Freshman Forgiveness, know that AFROTC doesn't accept that and they will factor in the failing grade and bring down your gpa for your package.
Another thing is WORK OUT. We had about 8 or 10 scholarship cadets come in the fall. 4 or 5 of us passed the first time for the PFA. It's not like these guys were unfit, there were a lot of hard core runners that could max the run time, but CORRECT pushups were a struggle for them, situps also. I did Insanity over the summer to prep for it and it really helped me, dad used to be in the Marine Corps and I had him check my form so I didn't have any pushups not count for my PFA, situps were never a problem for me because I did them (both army and air force way) for years before high school and during. Highest I did for those on a detachment recorded PFA was 70 situps in a minute, all correct. But AF doen't give extra points for going over max so after that I do max and just slowly keep doing them until time is up. A good tip is to push both on the way up and on the way down, makes you complete them faster than if you just let your body fall. Just make sure you get somebody to check your form that knows what their talking about, PE teachers and coaches are generally not a good source on that. Ex-military is preferred.
