Currently a junior interested in applying to USNA, but I’m not sure what it is I’d be doing on a day to day basis while serving. Most likely I’d end up being a Quantitative Economics majors, possible operations research. Thanks!
You would commission as a Navy or Marine Corps line officer. You make your request at the beginning of senior year and find out late fall (this past week was service assignment for Class of 2017). Of course you have three years to explore options and hit wickets necessary for certain options.
Choices are: Marine Air, Marine Ground, Navy: Surface Warfare, Aviation (Pilot and Flight Officer), Submariner, Special Warfare, EOD, Information Warfare, handful of medical slots. All submariners are nukes. Nuke is an option for Surface. I think I hit everything.
Go to Summer Seminar. You’ll get a brief on the options. Google it.
Sportsman88 hit all of the choices. Your major at USNA has little to do with most service assignments. The exception is the medical billets where there is a track for pre-med candidates.
Your day to day duties will vary widely depending on your training path and billet. Example - SWO you would report to a ship right away after a 4-week SWOS and learn as you do your job. In the aviation track you would be in school about 2 years before going to a unit. If you have an idea of what you want to do we may be able to give you some better answers.
I would probably go surface, I really have no interest in flying. Thanks for the replies
Once assigned to a ship as an Ensign you would start as a division officer. There are many different divisions, communication, engineering, gunnery, etc. Each division officer is in charge of anywhere from 6 to 40 sailors. These are your people and your responsibility. Learn to lead in this small group and your responsibilities will increase. Day to day activities would be supervising, meetings with ship staff, writing FITREP/EVAL which are performance reviews for your people, scheduling, etc.
Also, if you’re thinking about majoring in Ops Research. there are opportunities to pursue this in the fleet. Officers who have OR majors and have a 3.0 major QPR can receive an Operations Analysis sub-code, which essentially means that for shore duty(your job in between deployments), you could work for the Navy/DoD doing real life operations research
Would engineers be similar to the med school track? By that I am asking would they be assigned to an engineering role or sent for additional schooling in a particular discipline?