"In Between"

My thanks to the Admins (EG & Paul) for the warm welcome here at NavyDads. I found the site when my wife noticed a magazine ad for navyformoms.com and signed up. Like EG, I figured there had to be a corresponding site for the other gender, and am grateful that EG (and others) have put so much effort into making what looks to be a great site.

I titled this post "In Between" because my daughter is in a slightly different situation than many of your sons and daughters. You might think of the joining process as binary - you're either in the military or you're not - and at one level that may be true, but there are other levels to consider. I put in "my child is thinking about joining" because she's not yet taken the oath, but yet she is committed.

Audrey has accepted a place in the Class of 2013 at the Hebert School of Medicine at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, MD. As a part of this acceptance (of her by the school and her acceptance of a place in the program), she will be commissioned as an Ensign (O-1) in the US Navy in a few weeks. She is to report to Newport RI on June 21 and will complete Office Development School (ODS) run by the Navy Officer Training Command. Thus, she won't be going to Great Lakes as many of your sons & daughters do. After ODS, she is to report to the USU campus on August 3 for training prior to the start of her MS1 year.

Her mother and I are still trying to figure out all this... I did not serve in the military (though looking back on my history, it would have done me a lot of good to go that route as some point in my development), so I know little about the culture and traditions of the Navy. I have good friends who both served in the Navy - a flight surgeon and a carrier pilot - but in completely different eras, so I'm grateful for this site to help with some of the acronyms and procedures.

Audrey has had an ongoing interest in serving in the Navy since high school. She applied to the Naval Academy and actually received the nomination of our congressman for entrance, but didn't gain admission (she completed a B.S. in biochemistry at CalPoly San Luis Obispo last year). She has spent the intervening year as an emergency medical technician (driving an ambulance) in her community and applying to medical schools. She turned down admission to three other medical schools (Drexel, Temple, and Univ of Southern California) to attend USUHS. The teamwork and camaraderie of the military is very important to her and fits well with both her commitment to serve and her own learning and leadership style. She is excited to begin this adventure (and is impatiently awaiting her commissioning paperwork). Her mother and I are also excited (and truth-to-tell, a bit apprehensive) and very proud (you can tell that by the tome of this post [!]) of her achievement and her choice to pursue her medical training in the US Navy.