Hey
I was accepted unconditionally into the USUSH. I have a feel for the student life and what not, but can anyone speak to the military aspects such as the OBLC, field exercises, drills, etc.?
Thanks in advance!!
I was class of 2002 (Navy). The military side was minimal, except for the officer indoctrination course you go to before starting school.
OIS was the Navy equivalent of the Army's OBC, and it sucked. I hear it's shorter by a couple weeks now, but I'm not sure. It may be very different than it was ~10 years ago when I endured it. They tried their best to make it like boot camp, but the futility of herding a bunch of med students, dentists, and optometrists through that kind of daily absurdity was almost comical. I say comical because if you didn't laugh at the knuckle-dragging ******s who were lecturing from dog-eared copies of "7 Habits Of Highly Successful People" at a bunch of people who'd already achieved more in life than the instructors ever would, you'd cry. We lived in 1940s era barracks that needed painting, so one day they told us to paint it. (They were short on paintbrushes, so they gave us a box of latex gloves and directed us to sort of smear the paint ... and when we did a crappy job, they told us to do it again, and gave us some sponges. I'm still not sure if they thought that was a good idea, or if they were just screwing with us.)
In school, you wear uniforms to class each day, but the whole campus is a no-cover, no-salute area. A couple times per year we had formations outside. Physical fitness test twice per year. A handful of minimally-time-consuming ankle-biter classes on military medicine.
A week camping in the field with the Marines at Quantico after the MS1 year. Kind of fun, unless you hate the outdoors. Summer after your MS1 year, you spend some time doing non-medical stuff with a unit of your choice - this can be almost anything, so it really depends on what you set up. Another week of camping sometime during your MS4 year.
Except for the pre-USUHS officer indoctrination course, the military side was very understated. It certainly didn't impose on learning medicine at all. USUHS was a great place to go to school.