- Dear Zhaf Razhid,
I'm thinking you're anything but the typical engineering student. Destined for a desk job? No way. You'd rather be out there -- immersing yourself in adventure, intensive hands-on training, and increased management and leadership responsibilities. And fast!
Check this out. The Navy Nuclear Propulsion Officer Candidate (NUPOC) program pays a $10,000 sign-on bonus and up to $75,000 ($2,500 per month for up to 30 months) to finish college. . .right now.
There's more of the same in the rest of the letter. You duly note that the bold isn't my embellishment. It appears exactly like that in the letter I received. Oh, and this is also a good section:
- Take it from me. . .you'll do more in a few short years than most people do in a life time - all before you're 30 - in the Navy Nuclear Propulsion Officer Candidate program.
Besides the weirdly awkward use of language to appeal to what the Navy assumes a young person wants to hear (e.g. "Check this out"), there's a couple of things wrong with the letter. First of all, I am not, nor have I ever been, an engineering student. I am an ENGlish student. I assume that whatever database I was entered into, someone or some computer, saw the ENG prefix and made the wrong choice. And if they are suggesting that I will see a lot of things before I am thirty, well--I'm sorry to say that they're too late by a couple of years.
I have nothing against the Navy personally; it's just not my cup o' tea. But as an English student, I couldn't help but try to give the letter a close reading. For example, when they write that I'd "rather be out there -- immersing myself in adventure," I wonder if you could substitute "out there" with Iraq and "adventure" with "being shot at." Plus, the idea of being an officer in a nuclear submarine hundreds of feet below the surface of the red sea does not sound that appealing. For one, no matter how great the air filters on a sub happens to be, I'm sure they still s-t-i-n-k. A couple of hundred men cramped in a stuffy tin can is not exactly a rose garden. Furthermore, living a few hundred miles away from a nuclear power plant is one thing, but if something major ever happened to go wrong on a nuclear sub, you could not exactly go outside and run away. Besides, if I were ever going to join the Navy, it would have be with guys like these. There the dancinest bunch of guys you'll ever hope see. (Just kidding. I'd much rather stay where I'm at.)