Fresno State’s ROTC cadets have the opportunity to travel to locations around the world through the “Project Global Officer” initiative, which focuses on language education, international study and cultural immersion.
Project GO is available to Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine cadets across the country. The program focuses on countries in the Middle East, Asia, Central Asia and Africa.
Rachapol Lamee, the Army ROTC’s scholarship and outreach coordinator, said that the fully funded program is open to contracted and non-contracted cadets and gives them the opportunity to earn college credits.
Fresno State cadet Ryan Carder participated in Project GO. He traveled to Morocco in 2013 and Jordan this summer for schooling to learn Arabic during the eight-week program. During the summer, he lived in an apartment in Amman, Jordan, with three roommates and attended school Sunday to Thursday, with Friday and Saturday as his weekend.
“We went over there to study language, not just the culture,” Carder said. “We hit the Arabic books hard in the classroom, then took it to the streets to practice what we learned.”
Carder said that his experience participating in Project GO was something that he would love to repeat and would definitely recommend to anyone in the ROTC program at Fresno State.
Another international program available to ROTC students is the Cultural Understanding and Language Proficiency (CULP) program, which is open only to contracted cadets.
It is a military-sponsored program that sends cadets to countries outside the Middle East and other places that Project GO doesn’t go such as Thailand, Guatemala, the Philippines, Malawi and Latvia.
Lt. Col. Lorenzo Rios, department chair of military science and leadership for Fresno State’s Army ROTC, said these programs are important and promoted within ROTC communities because of the skills they allow the cadets to develop.
The U.S. sends troops to foreign soil where they recognize a need, whether it is humanitarian or in defense, and the leaders of those troops are expected to have special skill sets, Rios said.
In the past, the term the Army used to define those skills was “comfortable in ambiguity.” The new model is “thrive in chaos.”
The program helps train future officers for those situations, Rios said.
“It’s much more than just a great summer experience,” he said. “You’re beginning to open your eyes and appreciate the complexity that’s out there and not be afraid of it and instead embrace it.”
ROTC students at Fresno State have an unusually advantageous experience, Rios said, because the campus is so eclectic and diverse.
“As the president of the United States has very clearly said, we will not go it alone, we will never go into any situation just by ourselves,” he said. “So what does that mean? There is an expectation that any person that is in a leadership position needs to understand how to work with others.
“Having these students have the opportunity to travel abroad and coming back and placing them in leadership positions here is a great thing not only for our university, our community, but also for our future leaders.”