The sweltering morning June sun shone over senior Eunseo Eo as she crawled through the mud. The sound of instructors shouting flew through the air as she completed her day of Sea Trials, a 14-hour-long test used by the United States Naval Academy (USNA) consisting of mental and physical challenges like doing sit-ups with a group while toting a tree-sized log. The Sea Trials event marked the end of her stay at the Academy in Annapolis, Maryland.
Eo, along with seniors Fletcher Dubin, Max Dubin, Aakanksh Gurnani, Levi McBeth and Han Yeung, attended the Academy’s Summer Seminar, a week-long summer program designed to teach rising seniors about the Navy and Marine Corps.
Most attendees hope to gain experience with life in the Naval Academy before applying to either the Naval Academy or the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) in college. The ROTC trains college students before they become officers in different branches of the military.
Mornings began at 5:30 with a workout, followed by sports and classes that a typical college student would take at the USNA.
“There was an exploration of the Academy’s academic prowess and we also got to learn a lot of traditions that the Naval Academy has as well,” McBeth said. “A tradition between the Navy and the Army is that every time we turned a corner while in Bancroft Hall, the dorm building for the Naval Academy, we had to say, ‘Go Navy, beat Army’ as a rivalry.”
Similar to the real military, instructors emphasized “being strong in the mind,” Eo said. “We had to memorize the ranks of the Navy and the Marine Corps. Squad leaders would walk around and yell at you for not being able to memorize the ranks.”
At the beginning of the program, attendees took the Candidate Fitness Assessment, an athletic test consisting of throwing basketballs as far as possible, pull-ups, a shuttle run, crunches, push-ups and a mile run. All USNA students are required to take the CFA for admission to the university. As students at the USNA are required to participate in either intercollegiate, club or intramural sports, the program featured inter-platoon athletic competitions.
“They didn’t really care about gender or who you are,” Eo said. “For example, we all played soccer together. Being a girl or guy didn’t really matter as long as you tried to participate.”
Eo decided to apply to the program to gain experience with the Navy system before considering applying to the ROTC in college, where she plans to pursue the medical school track. Due to the time constraints of managing pre-med course requisites, she said she does not plan to apply to ROTC. For his part, McBeth plans to apply to the Naval Academy for his undergraduate studies.
McBeth said, “The camaraderie and the friends I got to make were the best part of the whole experience. The people in my squad were from Miami, from New York, from Montana, from all over the U.S. I don’t think you would get to meet people from all of the U.S. in day-to-day life. The challenges they put us through were very physically tough, and we had to work together as a team to get a lot of tough things done.”
