Former Army Infantry Officer

>> My name is Trevor Cook. I went to Rollins as an undergraduate. I graduated in 2007 with a degree in Political Science. Right out there after I joined the US Army and served as an Infantry Officer in the US Army for 4 and half years and now I'm back here at Rollins getting my MBA. There's really 2 types of days when you're in the - like at least in the military right now, there's what we call a Garrison Day and then there's what we call a Field Day or Deployment Day. Garrison is your normal day to day operation, that's where you spent majority of your career and Garrison Day is you start it at 4: 30 in the morning. I'd wake up. I was generally on post at 5:30 am. From about 5:45 to 6:15 in the morning, you do kind of like your daily in brief, where they pass out any information that they need you to pass on or give you the task that they need you to accomplish for that day. At 6:30 started physical training, at 9:30 you're at your desk or wherever you needed to be for the day's operations and then you basically worked a 9:30 to usually about 6-6: 30 working day and then you went home and then you repeat the next day. General task in Garrison for an officer, you're probably going to be running around doing a lot of meetings, you're going to be sitting in on a lot of PowerPoints, you're going to be developing a lot of PowerPoint slides, writing drafting memorandums like for example, if you need if you're unit is doing rifle training, well you're going to have to draft memorandums explaining how much ammunition you intend to shoot, how many soldiers you intend to qualify, you know, justify why you want x number of rounds versus this and that and of course then you need to take set memorandums and get them to the people that, you know, sign off on them. So, there's a lot of I think most people would be surprised on how much, how similar the Garrison life of the military is to life at just your average Fortune 500 Company, I mean, a lot of the same sort of, I don't want to call it, bureaucracy, but a lot of the same kind of paper shuffle exist in the military. Field or in deployment things change a little bit. Field training is-- when you're in Garrison instead you basically move out of Garrison into, as you might imagine, the field in which case you usually live in tents or you sleep in your vehicles. Sometimes it'll have cots and like barracks, you know, at the training area but very rarely and you generally pretend like you're not in Garrison and those are usually the days when you're out shooting, you're out conducting battle drills which are just rehearsals of tactics and maneuvers that you would use in a combat situation. And that's sort of the closer to what most people picture the military being like, you know, running around in the woods with rifles playing soldier, that's generally what the field is more like. And then down range was in Afghanistan was kind of a mix of the 2. Because I would quite often spend my mornings out with my guys either on patrol or overseeing training for the Afghan Armies who were sort of very much out in the field, feeling kind of sort of cut off from the fob or the base, I'm sorry. And then in the afternoons I'd usually come in for lunch and then spend the rest of my afternoons doing paperwork and attending briefings and meetings and getting sort of caught up on what's going on in Afghanistan so that I could then go and let my guys know, hey, you know, this unit was hit by an IED not too long ago on this road. So, let's make sure when we're driving near there tomorrow that we pay attention, like that kind of stuff.