As an exercise in situational awareness shows, my profile no longer shows the crossed cannon that signify the noble profession of Field Artillery.  Rather, the crenellations of the crest of the Army Corps of Engineers are displayed.  Why this change? 

        In the world of ROTC, there comes a time in a cadet's senior year where they must do some soul-searching: choosing your branch.  For those cadets who aim to go into the active side of the Army, they choose their top three choices, and depending on their place on the national Order of Merit List they may get their top choice or not.  They may not even get any of their choices, depending on the needs of the Army.  For those such as myself who choose the National Guard or Reserve option, the process is significantly different: we go shopping for units that have openings.  I believe my decision-making process was typical of most cadets'.

     First of all, you have to think about what you want to be doing for the next four to six years, as that is how long you will be spending as a PL, XO, and then CO.  You also have to think of whether you will be able to have upward mobility in your state.  For example, my state only has one company of infantry, so competition for infantry officers is strong.  Proximity to the unit is also another factor, and after years of driving over an hour to all of my units, it was quite a big factor for me. 

   Coming from a combat arms background, I immediately went for infantry.  But both my state and the state I went to school in were at 125% capacity for officers.  So I picked the next closest thing, field artillery, which that state had a whole brigade of, and their armory was about an hour away from me.  Reasonably pleased, I settled back for the last semester of ROTC.  However, I was slightly ill at ease with my decision, as I knew the FA unit I was going to hadn't deployed with their guns for awhile.  It was my opinion that if I was going to be deployed, I would like to be doing the job that I trained for.  Around this time, I started looking at the EN battalion in my state, the descendant of the command my childhood hero Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain once held.  I held a meeting with the BN XO, who explained how the BN operated and how he liked to have his officers serve in all capacities of the engineer field: horizontal, vertical, and combat.  This immediately captured my interest, especially when he told me that my first unit would be fifteen minutes away from where I lived.  With the promise of good upward mobility, an exciting career, and the elimination of an hour commute, I gladly accepted the offer and that is how I now am slated to follow in the career footsteps of so many great American leaders, such as Robert E. Lee, George Meade, and Douglas Macarthur.