The Land of Opportunity

West Point is an odd sort of place. Everyone who comes here hates it, but we all chose to come and we all choose to stay. Why does this happen? Well its different for everybody, but one thing that helps is the abundant opportunities made available to cadets through summer/spring break/random other time trainings. This place really allows you to do what you want, without giving you any freedom. . .

This year, as a plebe, there have been and are many opportunities presented to me. Of these, I am only going to tell you about three that have been causing great debate in my mind lately. The first is USMAPT, United States Military Academy Parachute Team (we love acronyms). Not only would the army pay for me to get my skydiving certification, but they would give me chances to dive six days a week (weather permitting) and go all over the world to do it! What a cool opportunity! It comes at a price though. You have to commit to the team for all four years, which includes giving up your Christmas break, some of you summer, and inordinate amounts of your time throughout the week. I opted out of that one and am probably going to forever wonder if it was the right decision to make. . .

SCUBA diving courses are available every semester here. I wanted to sign up for the SCUBA team but missed the try-outs and also missed signing up for the class this semseter. At some point I will take the time to do that though.

And finally, rock climbing. I don't have much upper-body strength and have never been incredibly sucessful with climbing rock walls, so this wasn't really something open to me. That is, until we went rock-climbing for my PE class ("Military Movement", called that because it sounds too panzy to say we do gymnastics). It didn't take long before I realized that I wasn't too bad at what we were doing, so maybe I'll go down to the rock wall this Wednesday and see if the team is desperate enough to ask me to climb with them. We'll see. . .

The point is, as much as cadets like to whine and complain about how hard life is and how bad it sucks here (as you will probably see me do from time to time on here), there really are great opportunities waiting for those willing (and blessed to have time) to pursue them.