Military Service
Dr. Thomas Stafford describes what he learned from his time serving in the military and Army ROTC and how students can learn leadership skills by joining the military.
Interview on 2012-05-03 00:00:00 -0400
Transcript
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Well I'll have to tell you that military service for me was one of the very best things that ever happened to me.
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For one thing if you go through ROTC it doesn't matter whether it's Army or Navy, Marine Corps or the Air Force,
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you're going to have-.
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You will be in a program that will develop you as a leader
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and develop your leadership skills way beyond any other thing you could do in college.
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You know you can take a course on leadership and you can study it and you can discuss it in class,
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but that doesn't even come close to discussing it in class and then going out in the field and being in charge of a squad or a platoon,
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which is what you do in ROTC.
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So the primary impact on me was in development of my leadership skills
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and I like to tell people that some of the things that I do right now to this day in my job as vice chancellor
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are things that I learned in Army ROTC and that I learned on active duty.
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One of the great things about going through that program is that
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when you finish the program and you graduate from college you're going to be twenty-two, maybe twenty-three years old
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and if you go right on to active duty as a second lieutenant you're going to be given a responsibility
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that anybody else wouldn't have until they're in their late twenties, probably.
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I mean you're going to have a lot of responsibility.
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You're going to be in charge of a lot of people, a lot of equipment, and probably a good bit of money in terms of the budget.
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My point is that you'll get a higher level of responsibility at an earlier age than you ever would doing anything else,
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and that's one of the reasons why I really encourage students at NC State to look at ROTC.
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Then once you've gone on active duty then you're really going to be tested because your training is over.
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Your preparation is over and you're out there and you're in charge and you're in a real, live military environment
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and you've got to take charge and project your leadership skills.
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You've got to let the people who are in your unit know that you're the leader and you're in charge.
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Those are the main things that I learned in the Army.
This video is an excerpt from a longer interview. Contact the Special Collections Research Center to request the transcript of the full interview.
