Budget cuts.  Two words that scare the living daylights out of any organization.

The NROTC program is pretty cheap on operating costs.  The salaries of our officers and administrative workers, the costs of desks and copy machines isn't very much.  Nope, the real cost of NROTC comes from all of those full ride scholarships.  This semester, my education costs American taxpayers $20,941.00, not to mention book money and our stipend.  That's a lot.  You/The Navy can send a kid through a public school like a UC for a third of the price of a private school like USC.

The Navy has been doing cost/benefit analysis to see their investment per ensign at each NROTC school.  Many students drop before they commission, so the costs are usually higher than simply the tuition per person.  Not suprisingly, they've realized that private schools are very, very expensive and are starting to decide that it is not cost-beneficial to maintain the NROTC program at certain private schools.

I've searched google, and I don't see any article on this yet so I guess we're not supposed to mention schools by name.  But a certain private school that was extensively used by the Navy as a training facility during WWII and at one time produced more officers each year than the Naval Academy will be closing its NROTC program very soon.  There's a whole list, I think there's about 10 programs that will be cut in the near future.

USC is safe, for now.  It's approximately in the middle of the cost-benefit list.  It's not going anywhere, at least not until well after I commission, but I can't make any guarantees a decade or so from now.

The current freshman class is bigger than the Navy anticipated, and people aren't quitting fast enough.  Ha.  So rules for them are extremely strict.  They can not switch out of a non-technical major (such as engineering or hard sciences).  They are much more likely to be disenrolled for any infractions.  All incoming freshmen now have to be technical majors.  No more art history or choral studies, but also no more political science, or international relations, or history, or language majors (with very few exceptions).  Sucks for those kids, and I'm not entirely sure it's a good decision for the Navy.  Oh well.

In other news, the Navy REALLY REALLY REALLY needs submarine officers still.  I have a feeling I'm going to be dragged kicking and screaming into a nuclear officer interview with the Admiral commanding the nuclear program against my will.  *sigh*

Anyways, apparently I'm pretty moderate.  Yay!

You are a              Social Moderate          (50% permissive)               and an...           Economic Conservative           (68% permissive)                 You are best described as a:      Centrist                                                                                                                                                                             Link: The Politics Test  on OkCupid.com: Free Online Dating Also: The OkCupid Dating Persona Test

I haven't posted on xanga since... last year!  I was away on my family vacation to Vietnam, but since then I was jetlagged for a few days and then I was just lazy.

Vietnam was great!  This time our itinerary was:
Day 1: Arrive in Saigon, drive to Can Tho.
Day 2: Visit family in Can Tho (technically off on the Mekong River)
Day 3: Drive to Ha Tien (very southern tip of Vietnam, near Cambodian border)
Day 4: City tour of Ha Tien.
Day 5: Take a boat to the island of Phu Quoc, off the southern coast of Vietnam. (I found out later that it was a hydrofoil! No wonder we were going so fast!)
Day 6: Tour the island of Phu Quoc, and take a small boat to see some of the smaller islands around it
Day 7: Fly back to Saigon
Day 8-12ish: Spend time in Saigon visiting family and seeing the city.  And watching USC dominate Boston College in the Emerald bowl of course.

I think our trip was actually 15 days, so I must have missed a few in there.

This was the first time I've been to Vietnam since 2007, the summer after my high school graduation.  It's only been three years, but it feels like there have been definite changes.

One of the first that I noticed right away was a massive improvement of infrastructure.  Everywhere I went, there were major road and bridge projects.  I used to joke that the rough, dirt alley behind my house in South Central LA was the equivalent of a major highway in Vietnam.  And I wasn't really kidding.  On my last trip we went to visit some of my Dad's extended family, and the day long car journey from Saigon was utterly miserable.  The highways were paved for a while around major cities but quickly degraded to gravel and eventually mud, even on the important routes.  There were "potholes" that spanned the entire road length (and they were filled with water since it was the rainy season).  But this time, I was seriously impressed by the general condition of the roads.  Around Saigon it's a given, but all the way down to Ha Tien and on the tiny, seemingly insignificant island of Phu Quoc, the roads were immaculately paved.  One problem is that they are often still too narrow.  A narrow residential street in California is a major highway in many areas that I traveled on this trip, with traffic from a flood of motorcycles, cars and even large trucks going both directions.

Vietnam is still plagued by rickety bridges and ferries.  Around Can Tho and the Mekong River Delta, you can image this is a pretty serious transportation bottleneck.  There's still a multiple-hour wait at the ferry crossing the Mekong on the way to Can Tho from Saigon.  That said, off in the distance you can see the skeleton of a shiny, modern, Japanese-engineered bridge that promises to ease all of the congestion.  It's several years late and running over budget because money keeps magically disappearing, but hey, at least it's on the way.

I remember the first time I visited Vietnam, power outages were a common experience, happening almost every day.  If you look at the tangle of power lines in major cities, you won't wonder why.  But on my subsequent trips, I think it's really stabilized.  I only noticed one outage this entire trip, and it was only a few seconds long instead of hours.

One reason for all these improvements is that Vietnam is really working hard to court international tourism.  Obviously I was in pretty touristy areas so that's why I came to such a conclusion.  Modern, high-standard hotels are popping up everywhere, and I saw Western tourists everywhere I went.  On previous trips, I mostly noticed the hardcore mid 20's Westerners (mostly French) who were backpacking across East Asia, but this time I see plenty of older people and families too.

Another interesting thing I noticed was the foreign influence on culture, especially among young people.  There was a state run MTV-like channel that constantly played popular music videos that people could vote for online and with a text message.  It played Japanese and Korean pop songs almost exclusively, with very few traditional Vietnamese songs thrown in for "balance" I bet.


It was great getting to see some of our relatives.  All of our close extended family lives in America or Belgium, so the only people in Vietnam are like my parent's cousins and their families.  We visited some of my mom's cousins in our ancestral area on a little branch of the Mekong near Can Tho.

We also visited a very good friend of my mom's family, who we call Uncle Tai.  He was a student of my grandfather (a dentist) and is now a successful practicing dentist of his own.  We visited his hospital, and I had a fascinating adventure in the land of socialist-universal-healthcare, for the lulz.  Uncle Tai offered us all free dental checkups, and he pulled favors with other doctors so we could have checkups for whatever we wanted.  I got my cough diagnosed as a throat infection and was prescribed some medicine, and I got my eyes examined for a new pair of glasses (yay for abusing the Vietnamese healthcare system).  Comparing it to UCI Medical Center of my beloved Troy Tech Internship was unfair, but interesting.  The Vietnamese hospital had a pretty decent dentist, optician, and general practice offices, but anything beyond that seemed pretty sketchy.  They had an X-ray machine, and that seemed like the extent of their diagnosis aids (no fancy CAT scans or MRIs).  And let's just say I'd stick with UCIMC's ER any day.  I didn't get to see any other specialized areas like an ICU, cancer or burn center so I don't know about that.  All in all, it seemed pretty capable of handling smaller stuff, but I'd be worried about serious trauma or diseases.


I hate flying east.  I can fly west and not miss a beat, but flying east leaves me jet lagged for days.  :(

Since my recovery though, I've mostly been super duper lazy.  Played a lot of Team Fortress 2, what a great game with all the new class updates.  I haven't seriously played FPS since the summer though, so of course I really suck now.  It's demoralizing to see how far I've fallen, lol.

School starts on Monday.  I'm enjoying the last few days of total freedom/laziness.  I'll write about how last semester turned out tomorrow... maybe, lol.

This is as good a time as any for a study break.  I have a 10 page paper due for one of my IR classes on Monday.  I've finished all the research, planned it all out, now I just need to actually type it down.  The hard part.  Tomorrow will not be fun.


I spent the day at the La Habra Field Meet.  CDR Stubblefield and I were disappointing that Troy didn't show up, though I understand you've had quite a few busy weekends.  He's still disappointed though, lol.

I wanted to be a drill judge, but the Marines got to it first.  Oh well.  Instead I was the head proctor for Academics.  A fitting job, considering my resume.

I took the test myself for fun.  I'd say it was of average difficulty, though there were some crazy far out questions that blew my mind.  Like "How much money does Michael Jackson's dad say he needs for monthly living expenses?"  Turns out it's $20,000.  I guessed $25,000.

There was one page missing on the printout of the test.  So we just had everyone skip those 7 questions and leave them blank.

I ended up with a score of 35/45 (because I used the master copy that did have the missing page) or 30/38 if you discount the missing page.  It turns out that I would have been in a 4 way tie for 1st Place Individual Academics with my 30 score.  Even when Troy isn't there, a Troy cadet still manages to get the top score!  ;D

At the awards ceremony, CDR Trotter presented the USC midshipmen with a special plaque for our participation.  That was kind of cool.  I had to resist the urge to steal the 1st Place Academics Team and individual medal though.

Alright then.  I need to get back to work.  *sigh*

During today's general military training, our Colonel gave us a two hour talk about leadership.  He said a lot of good things and shared many interesting stories about his career ("You're in trouble, the general wants to see you." seems to be a theme of his career) but the most striking thing I saw was this quote:

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"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat." -Theodore Roosevelt

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I've heard it many times before, but it feels relevant today.  Quote of the day!

Well, the greatest thing to happen to me this week is that I (or my pictures, rather) were published for the first time in the Daily Trojan!

Here's a pic from Thursday's Sports page:

Both pics are mine, and there's one more inside.  My first picture was published on Tuesday.

I get paid per published picture, and that's four already!  In my first week!  I'm pretty excited, lol, but I'm still waiting until I get a check in my hand.


It's been a busy semester for me.  Much busier than I ever expected.  My job as fundraising officer has been really draining.  It seems like every day I have to run around and see our fundraising partners like the Assistant Athletic Director or the head of Public Safety trying to work out our deals.  Colorguard has been really time consuming too, having to set practices for the football game colorguard and arranging other community service and fundraising colorguards.

At least I only have to wake up at 7, except Thursdays.  Next week, 0630 drill practices start, almost every day.  Yay.

And at least I don't have midterms (well, just 1 take home so far) which everyone else is sweating right now.  But I haven't focused on my classes as much as I want to, and I (as usual) have been slacking off on my reading.  I went into my IR 261 (East Asia in IR) class on Wednesday, and had absolutely no idea what the discussion was about (diving deep into theoretical explanations of east asian IR).  That's not good.  I get that feeling all the time in Physics or Calculus, but I've never been lost in IR before.  Need to study more.


Tomorrow, I'm responsible for a fundraising event at 1600, using midshipmen as gate attendants and ushers for the Coliseum.  At 1730 I start my job as colorguard commander.  After that, I'm playing sports photographer for the Daily Trojan.  It'll be a busy, but hopefully very rewarding day.  :)