By Julie McWilliams

Unlike some new college graduates who aren’t sure what their futures hold, four May graduates of the University of Pennsylvania have known for years where their paths will lead. All completed the Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps program at Penn, and this spring, they finalized their duty stations.

Lydia Miller’s future includes a stint on the guided missile cruiser USS Lake Erie, based in San Diego. Louis Petro will serve on the U.S. naval destroyer USS John Paul Jones in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Julie Roland will learn to fly aircraft at Navy flight school in Pensacola, Fla., and Matt Weber opted for the U.S. Marine Corps and will head to The Basic School at Quantico, Va.

“The NROTC students receive a full-tuition four-year scholarship,” says Mary Brass, the midshipman public affairs officer at Penn. “When the seniors graduate, they will commission as naval and Marine Corps officers and incur a five-year service commitment to pay back their Penn undergrad education. Right now, they’ve received orders that dictate where and how they will spend those five years.”

Although there are some exceptions, Miller is one, most Navy and Marine scholars choose to go the NROTC route as high school seniors and then pick their college or university, Brass says. Four years later, as college seniors, they make their service selection in October, which means they submit their “dream sheet” of naval career opportunities.

“This could include serving as a surface warfare officer, or SWO, on ships such as a cruiser, training to work aboard a nuclear-power submarine, flight school or smaller communities like Navy SEALS or special forces,” Brass says.

Ship selection, an extremely competitive process of choosing their actual duty station, begins in March and just concluded.

Miller, who is co-captain of Penn’s women’s lacrosse team and has played for four years, didn’t join Penn's NROTC until she completed her freshman year. A lacrosse standout in high school, the Warrenton, Va., native came to Penn to play her beloved sport.

“Lacrosse was a big part of my college selection process, which included the U.S. Naval Academy,” she says. “I really liked Penn academically and loved the location in the city, but then I began to worry that I would be missing the naval experience.”

So, after being accepted to Penn, she applied to NROTC and was accepted the January of her freshman year. Now a fifth year senior with a double major in political science and science, technology and society in the School of Arts & Sciences, she went with surface warfare during her service selection process and, in the ship selection phase, chose the cruiser.

“In mid-March, all those designated for surface warfare are ranked nationally and are assigned a day and time to select their ship depending upon how good their rank is,” Miller says. “It’s sort of like the NFL draft. They call and ask you what you want based on the ‘real-time’ list you’re monitoring with your officer on their computer.

“I had a spreadsheet,” she says. “I was really Type A about it. I wanted a cruiser or destroyer because those two ships have a certain weapons capability and a faster pace, and I wanted to go out of San Diego.”

Petro of Weeki Wachee, Fla., a semi-rural area north of Tampa, says the summer naval cruises he did during college made him realized he really likes destroyers and cruisers.

“If you get assigned to be some sort of SWO, you get a ranked list of ship types, numbers of billets and locations,” he says. “You basically decide ahead of time what you’d like. The phone call decision itself took only about two minutes. I was ranking places in coolness order -- Spain, Hawaii, California, Florida -- and as I watched the list this destroyer and Hawaii were still open

“My first choice was information warfare to use my degree, but the Navy had other plans,” Petro says. “I was assigned SWO-nuke because the Navy said it needs qualified, good learners, the best and the brightest, so I was sad for only about two minutes until I realized the incredible opportunity.”

But why choose NROTC and Penn?

“Penn was my dream school,” says Petro, who graduated with a dual degree in computer science from the School of Engineering and Applied Science and cognitive science from Penn Arts & Sciences. “Although computers were my main focus, cognitive science is a great mixture of psychology, philosophy, linguistics, math and neuroscience. Penn lets me take classes in all these areas, and I found myself relating all these ideas to each other.”

“ROTC gives you the opposite outlook, opposite experience of most college kids,” he says.

“You start college knowing you have a job afterwards even if you don’t know the details.”

Also, Petro has two older sisters who are in the Navy, including one who went to the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis.

“Knowing me, she advised against the academy, saying that I would enjoy a place where my college and military life could be separate,” he says. “It occasionally overlaps, but there is a distinction, and it’s enriching to do academics and then pop out and be a military student.”

Roland, originally from the San Francisco Bay area and now of Baltimore, says she has always wanted to fly. She first applied to NROTC and then Penn, with its Ivy League tradition, academics, research and sports, even though she was unsure of a major.

“I lost my mom my freshman year,” Roland says. “Two weeks before she died, she made her way to Penn to witness my swearing-in ceremony. It was one of her last memories.”

“It was very difficult, but ROTC kept me going. It offered me an outlet, all the physical training, having to stick to a schedule,” says Roland, who ended up majoring in history and has other reasons for sticking with NROTC. “The Navy, over the other branches, has more educational opportunities and more opportunities for women.”

Including flying.

“When I first started doing ROTC,” she says, “I ruled out the possibility of pursuing a career as a pilot because I wasn't sure I would want to be locked into 10 years in the military.”

She then considered being a Navy lawyer, going SWO as Miller and Petro chose or going SWO nuke, which led her to spend a summer on the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz.

“It was this experience that made it clear to me that I wanted to fly. I realized quickly that I wanted to spend as much time as possible on the flight deck or with members of the aviation community and that the length of required service should not stop me from the branch of the Navy that motivated me the most,” she says.

So she focused her energy on becoming a pilot, studied for the aviation selection test and spent the next summer with a helicopter squadron in San Diego. In October, she learned she was selected as a student naval aviator.

“I feel so lucky that I have this opportunity,” she says.

Weber, a business operations and information management major at Wharton, hails from upstate New York and is the first in his family to become a USMC officer.

“I made the decision in high school to join the Marines,” Weber says. “There’s something different about the Marine Corps, and I just want to contribute in the best way I can.”

He explains that NROTC is one way to become an officer in the Marines, and, although he says “the day-to-day can be a little bit of a grind, it’s a good way.”

Weber spent six weeks last summer at Officer Candidate School in Quantico and will begin six months of training in September. However, unlike his fellow NROTC students, he won’t know what his actual job and duty station will be until he’s been there a while. He has a dream list of positions but is hesitant to share it right now.

“I just want to lead Marines,” he says.

NROTC midshipmen are used to hard work. Besides balancing traditional academic majors and minors and participating in varsity sports and other collegiate activities, they must complete eight Naval science courses, one each semester, covering Naval engineering, weapons and science. Also, leadership classes are held weekly, and the students meet for physical training sessions two to three times a week starting at 6:30 a.m. 

“The most challenging part is living a life contrary to the average college student who wakes up at 11:30 for a noon class,” Brass says. “They work so hard over the four years and see a different side of the undergraduate experience.”

She says that many midshipmen try to train and develop their leadership skills as part of their academic experience as well, serving as presidents of student groups and such.

Brass says that during the 2014-15 academic year, 15 seniors, eight juniors, 12 sophomores and 20 freshmen participated in Penn NROTC, which includes students from Drexel and Temple universities.

“Penn’s NROTC program started in 1940 and was one of the first in the country,” says Brass, “but its roots go back to the 1700s.”