Lawton, Oklahoma

I’m finishing up my time in Oklahoma this week by drinking with friends at night and sitting alone in a cafe during the day. It’s pretty reflective of my five months at Fort Sill, learning how to be an officer in the Field Artillery. 

You see, there are a number of ways to become an officer in the Army (West Point, ROTC, being a doctor, etc) but you won’t have a specialty (Infantry, Intelligence, Finance, Nurse Corps, etc) until you complete the next phase: BOLC. For the Field Artillery, we go to Oklahoma for five months and learn all about howitzers and communicating among the many forces that have to work together to shape a battlefield. It’s intense at times, slow at others. As the Army says: hurry up and wait.

Our culminating training event ended on Friday, so our only responsibility left is the paperwork to leave and then we graduate. For my Active Duty friends, they will be heading to Korea, Germany, Hawaii, Alaska, Washington, Colorado, etc. They have very exciting weeks ahead of them as they start the responsibility of being an officer. For the few of us in the National Guard (belonging to the different states, mine is Maryland), we get to go home to our civilian jobs. The guard’s commitment is one weekend each month plus a two week training that occurs over the summer. That’s how I can still work in software.

My job at Capital One in Philadelphia starts on the thirteenth of February. It is the Technology Development Program that they host to get recent college graduates inducted into the industry and company. It’s a really exciting opportunity and I’m so happy to be moving to Philadelphia next month. I’ll talk more about each later.

I’m starting this blog today because this is the turning point in my career. The time when I am finishing my initial training in Oklahoma as an officer, driving back to the east coast in my 2006 Honda Civic, flying to Ecuador for a week on a solo trip, going to my first National Guard weekend, moving to Philadelphia, and starting my first job in software. Wahoo!