I think most know I attended USNA for my plebe year, then separated and attended a liberal arts college. I would have been class of '93. I was talking with a friend about USNA last week and the question came up: Were you glad you left? Would you do it again?
Yes, and YES.
USNA wasn't a good fit for me. Oh, I did fine academically, physically, and militarily - had a 3.401 SQPR
after first semester and made the Dean's List. Yet I knew at the end of one semester that it wasn't the right place for me. It wasn’t the stupid day-to-day inconveniences of being a plebe – I knew better than to make a decision based on a state of existence that I knew would end at some point. I wanted to really think deeply about what I was learning and putting together, not just plug-and-chug. I wanted some academic ambiguity, some “gray areas” to wrestle with and fill on my own. The place was still much less of the liberal-arts model they've lurched toward in recent years. The biggest factor, though, and the game changer, was that I figured out I didn't want to be an officer in the USN or USMC. I talked to a lot of people ahead of that decision. They all tried to get me to stay, especially with that SQPR, and being a woman. Remember, this is still the early days of women being at the service academies, and my sense is they were working pretty hard to make sure the right ones succeeded.
So, I put in my separation papers after finals, stayed through June week (outprocessing), and walked out gate 3 in early June 1990 as a civilian. I transferred to a lib-arts college and graduated. A few years later I completed a PhD in a STEM field and am now a college instructor at a large university.
But wait, there's more to it.
Would I do that year over again? Yes, yes, a resounding YES. It was during that year of my life that some of my best habits, both of behavior and thinking, first began to coalesce and harden. I still get more done in less time than many people I know. I can ignore noise - literal and figurative - better than many people I know. When there is something important, really important, that needs completion, my commitment to the deadline is (usually) stronger than emotions or preferences or physical states ("I don't want to, I'm too tired, I'd rather read a book"). I learned to actively seek the people and resources I needed to get a job done. I learned, at a much earlier age than many of my peers, to endure. This isn’t to presume I wouldn’t have developed those habits of mind and behavior if I hadn’t attended USNA – but it would have taken me a lot longer, based on what I saw in my peers. I’m not sure I would have had the stones to handle some of the life situations that came up while I was in college, and shortly after I graduated, without those lessons, even as I struggled to understand what USNA had made me. In other words, the conscious understanding of what USNA had made me came long after the subconscious, but operational lessons.
This conversation came up with my colleague and friend in the context of an all-consuming project we're both working on. I told him about practicing survival breathing, and he asked what I meant, so I told him about the PE class (was it "just" fourth-class swimming, or combat swimming? I've long forgotten) in which the final test was survival breathing. That experience - surviving and breathing for five minutes in the deep end, with my hands and ankles tied - is something I've called on several times in the intervening 24 years. Like so many of my experiences at USNA, the literal has become a powerful metaphor in my life. Most of my time there fell on the disliked-to-hated continuum - and I'm so glad, so deeply thankful, that I had it.