cadet blogs

The End of the Semester

(The Cadet Experience, Class of 2014) Permanent link All Posts

It really is quite hard to believe that the end of the semester is approaching so rapidly! When I think about it, at this time next week I will be sitting for my first exam of my collegiate career, and three days after that I will be going home for three weeks. The home stretch between Thanksgiving leave and Christmas has been incredibly quick, but Thanksgiving break was a much needed chance to revitalize and, honestly, catch up on some sleep.

While I was on Thanksgiving break, I got a chance to tour the Point Judith Lighthouse and Station, simply by telling them that I was a cadet here at the Academy. It was a really great opportunity, to say the least, and it helped to give me an idea of the possible summer assignments that I could get.

Just before that, I celebrated my 18th birthday, and my first birthday away from home. The weekend prior, my parents drove to New York City and surprised me for my first collegiate swim meet, with cake in tow, of course. Then, I got to spend my birthday with some of my best friends and, of course, the Chase Hall Duty Officer for that day, who also happens to be my Nautical Science teacher. He thought it necessary to drop by my room and inform me that he could hear me clear across Chase Hall—as well as to re-emphasize that the amount of food within my room was slightly absurd.

Anyway, it’s clearly Christmas-time in Chase Hall, with everyone adorning their room with various holiday decorations. My room has a fiber optic Christmas tree, stockings on our door and everywhere throughout the room, a gingerbread house, and roughly eleven strings of Christmas lights decking out any surface to which they can be blue-tacked. My 1/c’s room has an inflatable Christmas tree with a door that sings any time someone trips the motion sensor, and down the hall from me we have a room that has the lighted reindeer, which most people would be accustomed to seeing on a lawn, instead of in a barracks room. Anyway, its lovely and cheery—and everyone is of course excited to go home!

Just yesterday, a fourth class cadet got to be the Assistant Commandant of Cadets for a day. Moira McNeil got promoted to an O-5 for the day and granted the fourth class carry on for the day, as well as a corps-wide laterack for Monday (which means that everyone gets to sleep in until 0730, as opposed to having to be up for our normal 0620 formation).

And just to make this last stretch a little bit better, we have a Holiday Formal this weekend. Lucky me, I get to wear an ungodly and ill-fitting dinner dress uniform—which is every bit as painful as it may look (although I might wear the pants, and not the skirt to ease the pain), as well as being escorted by a table of guys. It’s a good thing they are all like siblings to me, or it could potentially be an extremely awkward situation. In either case, it certainly will be the people that make the night, and definitely not the attire. In precisely a week and three days, I will be at home and somehow I find myself being fairly certain that I will actually miss this place and the people that make the Academy what it is.

More about Meredith.

Posted by Leann Strickland at 2/16/2012 10:40 AM