- Saturday afternoon: Knowing that you will be able to go off-base, get an hotel room, and some good chow without anyone yelling at you is priceless. Most of that time was spent talking on the phone, eating, and taking care of your body. Some people also study for the upcoming week but I never really had any issues to assimilate the academic stuff.
- Chow: Chow time was happy time although early on, all the yelling was a bit disconcerting. Sit down for a few minutes and just stuff food into your system as fast as you can. Most candidates will tell you that they live from chow to chow. That’s a way to look at it.
Worse:
- Coming back from Liberty on Sunday evening: This is by far the worse thing about OCS and makes you almost wish you had no libo to begin with. The reality sets in that you will have to survive another week until next Saturday afternoon. You looked at the schedule and it seems so far away, PT sessions, field events, academic tests. You can often see it on some candidate’s face but then all you can do is saddle up and take on the challenges.
- Eating only 3 times a day: This is truly horrible and definitely contributes to candidates breaking down toward the end of the 10 weeks. You will have chow around 5:20AM, before noon, and around 5:00PM which results in you starving most of the evening and night
- That’s all, I think the rest is part of the OCS experience really…
Popularity: 10% [?]
I have really enjoyed your blog! I am hoping to do OCS in October 2009 (if i get in
). I meet with the OSO with in the next couple weeks to start the process. I have good grades (3.4), did well enough on the ACT and i can do about a 275 pft (pull-ups have been my weak point.. but I will hopefully be at 20 by the time i have to pft)… It was great to read through your experience from start to finish. I read at one point that your thinking you will go to the OCS class 201?? What time period is that, I believe they have like 3 or 4 a year right? but hey man, i respect you for all your hard work and diligence! One last question, looking back at your pre-ocs training, what do you wish you would have done differently? What do you wish you would have spent more time on? Thanks!
Caleb, thanks for visiting my puny little blog.
Given my prior experience at OCS, I wished I had prepared better physically. It is one thing to train for the PFT but OCS is a completely different story. A good analogy would be: How well would you do on the PFT if you had run it a second time right after finishing the first one. Stamina is huge, it’s really not about strength at OCS. PT is not insanely hard but they will ask you to perform even though you are tired, cold, wet, hurt etc… I just was not physically ready and that’s the reason why I ended up getting stress fractures in my legs… OCS is ran 3 times a year (201 is in May 2009, you are hoping to go to 202 in October) If you have not already, visit marineocs.com, an excellent source of information on OCS.
I wish you the best of luck!
Wait you got liberty in OCS? Us enlisted folks got to go to church on Sunday that was our only break! I enjoyed the hell out of it though.
Yes we did. Libo was more a test of whether some candidates would go out in the civilian world and fuck up than anything else. It’s about 24 hours from Saturday afternoon to Sunday afternoon.