jsnuka said:
ROTC will not interfere with your studies much if at all.
ROTC programs vary significantly. You apparently went to an easy school for undergrad and had a laid back cadre. For those of us who went to competitive schools and majored in competitive areas, ROTC is a signficant time drain.
For starters:
1.) You have to get up at 5:45am 3 times per week. The West Pointers in charge of you won't think it's a big deal, except that they don't realize that it's impossible to get to sleep early if you live in a dorm b/c of noise. So have fun being sleep deprived 3 days per week for your entire freshman year; hope it doesn't impact your exams! And the kicker is that most of the PT sessions we had were pretty weak in terms of exercise (you'd spend half the time in formation with the seniors yelling at the juniors to do the commands right). So if you wanted to be in good shape you had to work out on your own either later that night or on the weekends.
2.) FTX's take up the whole weekend and you have ZERO free time during them. Plus you'll get little sleep. This was pretty inconvenient for us when we had exams the following week. And oh yeah, it was REALLY inconvenient for the people who were taking the Spring MCAT the week afterward (make sure you take it in the summer).
3.) The weekly class and lab take up the entire afternoon and WILL interfere with a class you want to take. It was next to impossible to get excused from it at my school unless there was no other way you could graduate.
4.) Third year of ROTC is especially time consuming. We had several people in the class above me (the ones who were in harde majors) fail a couple classes during it. That actually worked to my benefit though b/c whenever they tried giving me **** during exam times I could just remind them of what happened last year and they'd back off.
5.) If you're applying to medical school, avoid ROTC and go HPSP or FAP instead. Aside from the academic drain, even more important is the fact that many people do not get into med school the first time they apply. Most people just do some research and reapply, and frequently then get in (this accounts for a huge number of people in med school). If you're in the military, this won't be an option. You'll have to pray that you get in immediately, or you could be stuck being a quartermaster for four years and having to retake the MCAT, reapply after four years, etc . . .
