Introduction
Before I joined the NROTC program, I didn’t understand a whole lot about the training pipeline. As I did some research, I saw videos of cadets and midshipman going through a boot camp style environment their junior year of college, but was this the same as the enlisted boot camp videos you see?
After gradating from this program a few years ago, I learned so much more about the whole process and what type of training officers go through. This article will help you understand all there is to ROTC training and boot-camp related schoolhouses.
So do ROTC and NROTC personnel go to boot camp?
ROTC and NROTC students do not go to the same boot camp as enlisted. Rather, they attend Officer Candidate School (OCS) or Advanced Camp for a few weeks the summer of their junior year of college. These schools are designed to evaluate leadership potential in a controlled and challenging environment but they are not meant to have high attrition. Students receive plenty of OCS and Advanced Camp prep classes at their reserve unit so they are well prepared for this rigorous evaluation.
In the next section, I’ll talk more about what Officer Candidate and Advanced camp entails so you have a better understanding of the challenge that awaits!
ROTC “Boot Camps” Explained
Marine Options attend a 6 week OCS increment the summer of their junior year.
Leading up to this summer, you’ll attend Bulldog classes every Friday with your NROTC staff instructors. These classes are extremely helpful, and you’ll spend a few hours each week learning about USMC history, tactics, and OCS stress games (the stuff you see drill instructors do to recruits on Youtube). You’ll take these classes every year until you’re a junior. You’ll also workout as a unit to simulate an OCS training environment. Officer and enlisted “boot camps” are completely different from one another. Here’s some of the main differences explained.
Army Cadets go to Advanced Camp, which is a little shorter than Marine OCS.
The failure rate is extremely low on this school, and it is not as selected as Marine OCS. That said, it’s still good to prepare for it as much as possible. Ranger Challenge is a training evolution held every Friday morning and it works almost exactly as the Marine OCS prep classes. At my school, attendance was mandatory for anyone who was planning on doing a direct combat arms job (artillery, infantry, combat engineer etc).
Navy Midshipman do not go to any formal Officer Boot Camp or OCS.
During the sophomore and junior year summers, Navy midshipman will go to Sea Trials for 10 days. This is a fast paced environment designed to evaluate future officers on leadership under friction and competency on essentials skills such as navigation, programs and policies, and technical foundations of Naval Warfare. Some of my classmates went to this the first year they introduced this training. They basically said they were in a watered down boot camp environment while being expected to conduct ship drills.
There’s some distinct differences between the NROTC Navy and Marine program, even though both aspiring officers attend the same unit and conduct a lot of the same training.
Air Force ROTC does not go to Officer Candidate School or any boot camp environment.
They go through a Two Week Field Training program which is basically camping out with your class while evaluate on some field skills. It’s nothing to stress over and I hear it’s a lot of fun. My friend attended this training in the summer of 2021 and he got to paintball in the woods and learn some basic combat tactics.
Important Note: as a Navy ROTC midshipman, you will not go to Navy Officer Candidate School. Only civilian college graduates will attend if they didn’t do NROTC.
Do Naval Academy Personnel Go to Boot Camp?
As a student in any of the military’s academies (Air Force, Navy, Army), you will not go to boot camp, Officer Candidate School, or any other form of a boot camp environment. Because you’re living in a highly disciplined environment all four years and placed under a heavier workload than other college students, they don’t have their personnel attend OCS.
What they will do is get a tour of OCS. They basically show up for a couple weeks in Quantico if they’re Marine Options and get to see where everyone else trains. After, they fly home and forget that was even a thing in the first place. The same is true for West Point and the other academies.
The academy is super demanding from what I’ve been told. Your room is inspected almost everyday and you have to eat at the food hall sitting upright a certain way. There’s an extreme pecking order to class ranks and you wear your uniform almost every day too. Summer breaks are also a lot shorter while attending the academy. It’s a demanding environment that I specifically don’t recommend it for aspiring Marine Officers simply because it’s Navy topic intensive institution and it doesn’t increase your chances of getting the job you want in the Marine Corps. If anything, it actually separates you quite a bit from reality with little to no exposure to working with enlisted personnel.
Final Thoughts
I was extremely nervous when I first found out I had to go to Officer Candidate School (OCS) as a Marine Option. You see a lot of videos online about how challenging it can be. However, don’t underestimate your ability to grow personally and professionally over the three years you have to train for OCS. I grew my leadership skills a lot and improved my physical fitness considerably more so than when I first showed up to my NROTC unit.
Thanks for reading! If you have any further questions or comments, feel free to reach out at theyouculture@gmail.com and I’ll do my best to respond! Hopefully you have a much more thorough understanding of what the boot-camp style training events are like for ROTC and NROTC students since there isn’t a lot of information on the web to begin with. Stay tuned for the next article.