Alex Werden’s first impression of the U.S. Military Academy was right out of “Harry Potter.”
“It’s like showing up at Hogwarts,” he says. As a rising high school senior from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, he had gone to the storied Hudson Valley campus to participate in a summer leadership camp.
Like the fictional school, West Point is an imposing “castle on a hill,” he says, exemplifying its mission to groom the best and the brightest, albeit in leadership, not wizardry. After the weeklong experience, the college became Werden’s top choice.
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Not being from a military family, he took some time to adjust during the first summer of basic training. But gone are the days when the seven-week program was designed to weed out students, says Lt. Col. Rance Lee, associate director of admissions.
The school offers a broader range of majors than most service academies, from philosophy to electrical engineering. Still, the core requirements make up most of the academic workload of the first two years, including three semesters each of math and science and two of information technology. Other requirements sprinkled throughout the curriculum: a semester apiece of military history, leadership, law and officership.
Cadets spend part of their summers on military skills-building, including cadet leader development training after their sophomore and junior years. Other summer opportunities are voluntary, from fellowships on Capitol Hill to language immersion programs.
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After graduation, cadets are commissioned as second lieutenants and must serve five years on active duty, in roles running the gamut from aviation to finance to military intelligence.
Lee says that the academy looks for well-rounded students, those who excel in the classroom and have shown themselves to be proven leaders and athletes. The school boasts 28 intercollegiate sports — football and hockey are popular — as well as club sports.
But there’s also room for kids who “have off-the-charts SATs but aren’t the best athletes, or leaders who didn’t score 800 on their SATs but did well enough academically” to meet the rigors of the workload, he says.
Read on to find out what life is like at the rest of the five.
— U.S. Merchant Marine Academy
This story is excerpted from the U.S. News “Best Colleges 2017” guidebook, which features in-depth articles, rankings and data.
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Military Skills Part of College Experience at U.S. Military Academy originally appeared on usnews.com