As a senior in high school I am expected to have a, "plan" for what it is next in my life, and while it is not concrete yet I know wherever I go it will be in the US Navy. When I started the process of applying to the US Naval Academy and the Naval ROTC scholarship I was surprised by the emphasis put on physics and engineering sciences.

I asked one admissions member from the Naval Academy if I should put any type of engineering on my list of majors I am interested in. He then went on to tell me that doing so would make me a much more desirable candidate, interested I asked exactly why. What he told me was that the military is expanding its STEM abilities and wants its officers to have some sort of skill, such as engineering, that will benefit the military and make them of better use. This means they have increased heavily the amount of STEM majors they demand from academies and ROTC units.

I then called up my Uncle who is currently a Colonel in the Marine Corps, he at one time led an engineering battalion and told me how much more desirable men and women were who had engineering skills of any kind as they were taken into the unit and used to build bridges, buildings and anything else needed at the time. He also told me about the accelerated and paid for course the military offers because of the large need for these skills. He himself got a degree in just two years from the War college because the courses there are run so much faster than a regular school, and are also of course free paid by the military.

So after all this I was not surprised at all when I started my NROTC application to see that they required 75% of the scholarship earners to go into a tier 1 or 2 major of their choosing. And what does tier one and two include you might ask? Well just about any science, engineering or mathematical degree you can think of.

It seems like all my time then was not wasted in my physics classes, at least not in the Navy's eyes!