Whenever I tell people in Greek life that I'm in the Army ROTC program, they have the same reaction: “How do you do that? 5am? Do you have a social life?"
But I'm always confused. I'm puzzled because as I and everyone else in ROTC knows, getting up to work at 5 isn't all that difficult; giving up the occasional weekend isn't all that terrible; balancing school with ROTC and fraternity demands isn't all that problematic; and as ROTC and Greek life have taught me, leadership isn't all that arduous.
Leadership in essence only comes down to a couple of simple things: consistency and integrity. It is giving that extra ten percent when everyone else only wants to give the first 90. Unlike most college classes, in which one commits for a semester and promptly forgets the meaningless facts that one's learned, ROTC is about making leaders and developing healthy habits; it is about cutting away the fat from day-to-day life. It gives freshmen a structure that sets them up for success much like pledge ship does. ROTC enforces moral values of integrity, just like those that fraternities are built on. In reality, all ROTC is, is a large fraternity.
When freshmen come to university, an entire new world opens up to them outside the previous structures of their parents' home. Do they eat right? Do they stay up until 4am and sleep until 2pm? Do they go to class? Does Sixth Street become their new abode? The lack of structure is often too much for these young students to handle, and their grades quickly drop or they soon drop out. Many of these new academics join fraternities, which enforce time constraints, study hours, and discipline. These factors contribute to the fact that many fraternity members have higher grade point averages than regular students. The Greek system can breed leaders, just like ROTC, by providing opportunities to engage with a group.
Even so, ROTC offers a kind of surrogate parent. It forces you into a regulated and disciplined life in which you are accountable not only to the instructors but to your peers as well. It uses a crawl, walk, run method, gradually teaching you how to organize your life and then gradually taking away the structures artificially imposed on you. Furthermore, it puts you into situations further and further outside of your comfort zone. This forces you to adapt to new pressures and gives you opportunities to attempt new leadership styles. Thus by your senior year you are a self-sufficient, disciplined leader.
In my personal experience in the program as a freshman ROTC cadet, I was without discipline or much structure in my life. I wanted to stay up late, go out, play video games in the dorms and get by with the bare minimum in school. Fortunately for me, ROTC does not accept the bare minimum as passing. If you give anything other than your best to the program, then you get to have a “fun" time outside of regular training with a Cadre Sergeant and a kettle bell. In the program, the mixture of negative reinforcement with positive incentives pushed me to move from unmotivated to being my best. By that I mean it encouraged me to go out and be involved in campus life, pushed me to stay fit, and compressed my time, which made me make tough decisions about my activities. Furthermore, ROTC helped me learn to work with people with whom I didn't have anything in common. Most importantly it taught me how to listen to and how to follow others, even when I might have wanted to argue with what they were doing.
On that note, ROTC pushed me to get over my pride. As my Sergeant often says, "There's no place for pride here. Pride gets people killed." ROTC made me take that to heart and inspired a new attitude to ask for help, to fail, and to learn. In turn, that ability to fail but learn is what made me into a leader. For those readers who have been fraternity pledges, I'm sure that the ROTC experience sounds very similar to your pledge experience. Any good group can push you, force you to adapt, and build you into a better leader; ROTC just does an excellent job at it
