Poolee who wants to be an Officer

[Cole11]

i am 17 years old, and enlisted on october 24th into the USMCR, i wanted to go active, but wanted to go to college anywhere i wanted full time, my intention when i graduate is to switch over to active hopefully as an Officer, only trouble is my high school grades suck, will I get a
Commission if I get a C average in college?

[RoboRobinson17]

http://www.leatherneck.com/forums/sh...threadid=10582

Ok, go to this thread, and read it. There is about five pages of d@mn good info on ROTC, OCS, PLC, TBS, from people who have been through it and earned commisions. If you still have questions, either post it on the abouve thread, or PM one of the Gentlemen who responded. As a heads up, Lt. JDFAIRMAN prefers 'em posted....remember they are Officers, and use the proper form of respect, i.e., rank and or "sir", not "thanks dude". I think that your high school transcripts really matter just when your trying to get into college, but I'm just assuming...and assuming things make an a$$ of you and me...

SF,
Joe

[Echo_Four_Bravo]

A C means average... do you really think the Marines want someone average to be one of their leaders?

[PooleeCross]

Wait, I'm confused; you're 17; presumably you're still in high school and you say your *high school* grades suck, correct? Then why are you worried about not getting a commision if you get a C average in college? You haven't gone to college yet, let alone gotten a C average there (as an aside for the general fund of knowledge; most college's don't worry about letter-grade averages, but only about GPA's---Grade Point Averages, which is a numeric value, usually between 0 and 4 but sometimes between 0 and 5 [MIT has a 5 point scale, if I'm not mistaken]. A `C' average would correspond to something like a 2.0 at most Universities). If you're really serious about being an Officer of Marines, then by all means bust your ass in a University somewhere and get substantially better than a 2.0.

But I disagree with Echo Four Bravo's statement that, ``A C means average.'' It kind of does, but it kind of doens't, either; grades are very often abused as a means of judging a person, but really, there's a lot more to someone than just how they perform in a classroom, or on a small number of graded artificial exercises (be they homework, papers, exams or the like). Character, effort, good judgement, leadership, etc, are not represented by what grade one gets in multi-variable Calculus. What's more, some classes are harder than others; some majors are harder than others; some professors grade harder than others. Two people might do the same work (well, not *the* same, since that would be cheating, and academia has a code of ethics in that area on par with the Marine Corps, but imagine those two put in the same amount of effort and produce work of the same quality) in the same class taught by two different professors, and one might get an A, the other a C. Who gets what is the luck of draw at the registrar. And consider also whether the Marine Corps would rather have the guy with the 2.0 in High Energy Physics from Harvard or MIT, or the guy with a 4.0 in Basket Weaving from Podunk U? Finally, it happens very frequently indeed that someone does *really* terribly in the first semester or two (or year or two) of school, and then comes out strong, with solid A's and B's at the end. Overall, that person's GPA might be somewhere around a 2.0, but their *transcript* will show steady improvement over their entire college career, and *that* is often times more impressive than someone with a straight 4.0 throughout school. It shows someone who encountered adversity and overcame it. I know some companies that like to hire these folks rather than people who had straight 4.0's the entire way through school.

Now, I'm not just trying to be contrary here, just point out that grades in and of themselves aren't a good measure of a person. Of course, if you *plan* on doing mediocre grade-wise in College, odds are good you're going to do mediocre in the rest of life as well, which would pretty much kill your changes of becoming a candidate to lead Marines. On the other hand, my own brother was one of those folks who did poorly at first, and then really got himself together at the end and did well. His overall GPA when he graduated was somewhere around a 2.4 (that's a C+ or so when translated to a letter grade) and he still got an opportunity to go to OCS, and from what I understand, he was a very good officer.

[Editted to fix a typo.]