At NC State, Air Force ROTC cadets are encouraged to seek out and pursue opportunities to enhance their knowledge and skill sets, particularly in the form of summer Professional Development Training (PDT) programs.

This past summer, several cadets from ROTC Detachment 595 at NC State got a chance to participate in programs across the country, bringing back new knowledge and skills that will help them in their post college military careers.

NC State’s cadets had about a 92% selection rate in the PDTs they applied for, a significantly higher mark than the national average (67%).

“This shows that our cadets are outperforming other cadets across the nation and NC State has a stellar program to create opportunities for cadets to gain valuable experience and be competitive against their peers,” said Lieutenant Colonel Steven Jordan, the commanding officer of NC State’s detachment.

In addition to learning new skills and information, these programs also allowed NC State’s cadets to start building connections with military officers, cadets from the United States Air Force Academy and ROTC cadets from other colleges who they might work with one day.

“My favorite part was the networking,” said senior Julian Teague, a senior studying civil engineering who attended a civil engineering program in Florida. “I got to meet a lot of really cool people down there that had the same career interests as I did.”

At NC State, Jordan and the rest of the leadership cadre consistently push cadets to pursue these opportunities to better themselves.

“The fact that they push these opportunities out to us is awesome,” said John Tremper, who attended a glider flight training course in Colorado Springs. “I didn’t even know this was available to us, but our cadre are always pushing for us and giving us every opportunity we can get. I’m grateful for that.”

Teague found a perfect fit for his civil engineering career goals at Silver Flag, hosted at Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida.

He explained that the Silver Flag event is a showing of what cadets can expect as a civil engineer in the Air Force, including different units they might work with, jobs such as pavement design, soil and computer design of buildings.

The event includes officers and enlisted personnel from around the country and serves as a training event to assess their preparation level for different situations.

“Since that’s what I wanted to do, and then I get to go and see it, have some hands-on experience about what I’m going to be doing when I graduate, I found it very valuable,” Teague said. “It was kind of a morale boost, like this is what I’m going to be doing when I graduate, it seems cool and I like it. So now I’m excited for when I graduate and get to go in.”

A version of this post was originally published in DASA.