Rebecca Fitch is from Charlottesville, so enrolling at UVA was easy enough, but she hadn’t really found her crowd – didn’t feel comfortable as a freshman. Then she started choosing her courses for a second year.
“I had two extra credits in my schedule, and I wanted kind of an easy A – something to fill out my schedule and get the most bang for my buck,” she recalls.
Fitch scanned the list of 2-credit courses, looking for things that sounded interesting.
“And the first one that fit my schedule, and I liked the title of was Leadership and Decision Making, and I signed up for it and forgot about it until around August when I started getting texts from people talking about gear and PT and things like that.”
In the military, PT means physical training. In conversation with a counselor, she learned the class was part of a reserve officer training program – something she had never considered, but she decided to give it a try and discovered a whole new crowd of kids.
“They’re all such selfless people, not only for what they’re planning on doing, but because they’re so willing to give their time to do something for someone else," she explains. "They all really care about each other. The program has such a family environment that if I needed help with anything, they would stay late and come in early, even though I was probably a big pain in the butt, because I had no clue what I was doing.”
She failed the physical fitness test:
"Everyone who did poorly on the initial physical fitness test gets assigned someone who’s called their fitness mentor, and I failed on three or four of the events, so they knew I needed it badly. I was definitely seen as kind of the weakest link. I marched up to that mentor and said, ‘We’re going to go to the gym every single day, and you’re going to teach me how to be fit,' and he’s like this super buff guy, and I think he was like, ‘Okay – yeah, whatever.' Like 'this girl is not serious,’ and then I texted him the next day: 'When are we going to the gym/'"
Today, Fitch can do 55 pushups, can lift 180 pounds and run two miles in just 16 minutes. She has greater self-confidence and looks forward to her future -- providing mental health care for active-duty soldiers and veterans.
“I felt such a sense of purpose once I fully immersed myself in the program. I felt like these are the people I want to serve, because I saw how wonderful they are, and they changed my perceptions of them, and I realized this is what I’m meant to be doing. I felt so good and so happy working with these people, and I already knew that I wanted to be a therapist, so I thought why not combine the two.”
And the program has changed her in another fundamental way:
“I feel like I’m much less of a judgmental person, because I often judged the military before meeting people in it, and I’m also much more grateful. I feel so grateful for this program. I feel so grateful I stumbled into it. I feel so grateful for my friends I’ve made through it. It is full of just unique experiences most people my age don’t get to do. Like I learned how to qualify on an M4 rifle, which – I’ve never touched a gun before this and never thought I would, but now I feel kind of cool that I’m able to do that.“
Coming into the Reserve Officer Training Corps, she knew little about the armed forces.
“I didn’t know what the difference was between the military and the army. If I’m being honest, I didn’t know the difference between an enlisted person and an officer. I really was starting at zero.”
But next month – one day before graduation, she’ll commission as a second lieutenant in the army – then head for William and Mary to get a master’s degree in counseling.
