I have a ton of life stuff changing, and hopefully next month I’ll be able to talk about it. I’m extremely excited… and excited to be able to tell about it.

So, I’ll see you then, or I’ll see you another time…

More photos.

]]> http://www.nicholasbwright.com/blog/archives/2009/05/20/1174/feed/ 0 http://www.nicholasbwright.com/blog/archives/2009/05/17/1161/ http://www.nicholasbwright.com/blog/archives/2009/05/17/1161/#comments Mon, 18 May 2009 02:33:56 +0000 Nick http://www.nicholasbwright.com/blog/?p=1161

The Spring semester is officially over. Usually this means that summer’s begun, but since I have class starting tomorrow, I won’t get a summer break this year.

The semester ended well, with a few easy finals and a presentation. I was expecting the tests to be more difficult… With 18 hours next semester – all upper-division classes – I know the tests will be extremely difficult.

This weekend was the best one of the year so far: yesterday was a day of relaxation – hanging out, watching movies, doing nothing productive; today was fun – sleeping in, watching a baseball game, going to the park to throw the ball around. It was a nice reprieve before my 6-hour-a-day class starts tomorrow.

Have a great week.

Some pics from today.

I am excited, though, about my senior year in ROTC. This year was the big year for training since I’ll be getting evaluated at a 4-week camp this summer. But next year is my lead-and-train-others year, and I am going to be in a large leadership role for the fall semester. I’ll be in charge of roughly 80 cadets, but I think it’ll be manageable and fun… Only time will tell.

This weekend was my ROTC spring Field Training Exercise (FTX). This year the FTX was held at Ft. Sill, OK. We left Thursday afternoon and got back late this morning.

The 2008-2009 school year is the critical year in ROTC for me: I’ve been evaluated at different leadership positions throughout the school year, and I’ll be evaluated and assessed as a leader this summer. So, this FTX was to give us an idea of how the summer evaluation process is going to go.

My ROTC battalion was put into a new brigade of 7 schools last semester, so this FTX had some new schools attending. Only juniors attended, and we had about 150 cadets present. The training consisted of squad STX (Situational Training Exercises), day & night land navigation, and a PT test. I’d never been evaluated on a squad STX lane before, and I did well… but I learned a lot about the process. The summer evaluation is going to be a slow, dull, deliberate game that I’m going to have to learn to play, so the STX experience helped a lot. Land navigation was as smooth as usual, and the PT test went well, even with 20MPH winds and a temperature of 35F.

Now it’s back to regular eating and sleeping schedules, and school.