Grad School after NROTC

M

Mmmidshipman

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Jul 4, 2016
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I’ve been looking at trying to go to grad school right after I graduate NROTC with my B.A.. I would prefer going straight to grad school over waiting for my shore tour in a few years. I’ve heard of other newly commissioned Ensigns doing this, and there have been at least a few from my unit getting scholarships doing fully-funded one year programs. However, they have all been going aviation since the pipeline is a little backed up. I’m considering aviation or SWO at this point and I have a while before I service select.

Has anyone heard of going NROTC B.A./B.S. to M.A./M.S.? Have you heard of SWOs doing this? Would the Navy be willing to pay for it if I get into a one or two year program? I will not have accrued my G.I. Bill by that point so I would have to fund it by scholarships if the Navy doesn’t want to foot the bill. Otherwise, I’ll just wait for my shore tour to come around. Thanks for your help!
 
Sorry can't overall assist. I'll just point out that many online universities have a military tuition rate that is literally half price for military that are on active duty. I'll start a thread on that in a moment. Certainly discuss with your cadre and peers how they were able to secure this path of getting a fully funded year between graduating and starting your commission- it's good there is precedent that you can reference. Good luck.
 
There are many threads relating to graduate education for junior officers. You might get better results with a Google search string with “service academy forums” and other key words in the string, instead of using the SAF search tool.

The majority of officers get their Master’s in a Navy-approved area after their first operational tours. There are many options, including Naval Postgraduate School or another military grad school as a tour in under instruction status, fully funded civilian school, after-hours distance learning or onsite at college extension locations using Tuition Assistance. The military schools usually have a remote program as well, which is free. Be aware any program using the Navy’s dime or time will add either concurrent or consecutive obligated service “payback” time. And, reporting to the Fleet after 1-2 years in grad school immediately places you behind peers in terms of warfare specialty qualification. Not insurmountable, but a very hard slog to try to catch up to those in your rank you are being compared to in the command. A CO who would expect to use a LTJG in more advanced positions around the ship, like his or her peers, has to treat them like a wet-behind-ears Ensign. As I said, hard slog, but can be dealt with, because it does free you to do other things in the first post-operational tour. Pros and cons to weigh.

The place to start is researching primary sources: any NROTC instructions on policies relating to going to grad school right away vs reporting to the Fleet, and your chain of command.

The reason most JOs head out to their warfare specialties right away is that it is the mission of NROTC to replenish junior officers as others get promoted or rotate out. That is the primary need of the Navy. There may be reasons to grant exceptions to this; you’ll have to figure that out. The primary goal of a new officer is to attain qualification in their warfare specialty, so as to start being useful to the Navy after the investment of SA or NROTC.
 
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