No bones about it: Anatomy, ROTC a good match

It was a summer anatomy camp at Wright State that hooked him.

A high school student from the tiny, three-stoplight village of Centerburg just north of Columbus, Nicholas Myers spent a week at the university studying human anatomy and physiology.

Nicholas Myers says ROTC has taught him how to do things in a more efficient and practical way through training in such things as land navigation and rappelling off of towers. It has also taught him accountability, punctuality and time management.

“It was a great experience just to be inside of that med school,” said Myers, who was intrigued by the muscles and skeletal system of the human body. “It was a very nice facility and I very much appreciated the professors there. That really got me starting to think that I would like this campus as well.”

Cementing his decision to attend the university was a full ROTC scholarship. Myers, a sophomore biology major, hopes to get into the Wright State University’s Boonshoft School of Medicine and go on to be a physician in the U.S. Army.

The Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) is a college-based program to train students to become commissioned officers of the armed forces.

Myers’ interest in ROTC stemmed from his older brother, who went through ROTC at Bowling Green State University.

“It just ended up being a perfect fit, especially when I found out they would offer me a four-year scholarship here,” Myers said.

Myers says ROTC has taught him how to do things in a more efficient and practical way through training in such things as land navigation and rappelling off of towers. It has also taught him accountability, punctuality and time management.

Myers, a sophomore biology major, hopes to get into the Wright State University’s Boonshoft School of Medicine and go on to be a physician in the U.S. Army.

“I have to balance all of the requirements for my biology degree off of all of my requirements for the military,” he said. “ROTC has also given me a lot more respect for my professors and taught me how to appropriately interact with them.”

ROTC has also broadened Myers’ horizons.

As part of the Army’s cultural understanding and language proficiency program, Myers went to Romania, where he trained with Romanian paratroopers.

“It was an amazing experience just to basically hang out with Romanian special forces soldiers and to learn many of their cultural practices,” he said. “I learned so much about Romanians themselves, and I had barely known of them before I had gone over.”

And it was not all work and no play.

Myers was able to play a little recreational basketball—on a makeshift court on a blocked-off city street and on another court more than a half mile underground in a salt mine.

So far, the Wright State ROTC experience has been quite a journey for Myers, who grew up in a Norman Rockwell-like village of 1,700, where he was active in his church and would participate in service projects such as going to the local filling station and buying gasoline for people.

“It was a great town to grow up in,” he said. “I could walk down the street and know at least half the people I came across.”

Visit http://www.wright.edu/army-rotc to learn more about army ROTC at Wright State.