Nov 7, 2016

Page 1

CALIFORNIA STD RATES ARE ON THE RISE; FRESNO STATE REPORT CARD GOES DOWN

INSIDE

Monday, Nov. 7, 2016

Fresno State’s Award-Winning Newspaper

FresnoState.edu/Collegian

ROTC

FRESNO STATE’S

FIRST VETERANS WEEK

Army ROTC cadets stand at attention after their weekly lab class on Wednesday, Nov. 2, 2016 as their peer makes announcements in preparation for the weekend’s events.

Diana Giraldo • The Collegian

‘Soldier, athlete, leader’

Making leaders who will serve here and abroad

ROTC cadets experience culture outside the US

By Diana Giraldo | @DianaInspired

By Samantha Mehrtash | @SamMehrtash

“Leadership, excellence, today” are the words the Army ROTC cadets are taught to live by during and after they finish their journey at Fresno State. Master Sgt. Jose Quijas, a Military Science Instructor, said the word “today” in their mantra is key. “If they want to be leaders, they have to be leaders today. They have to have the leadership ability to lead men and women in combat, that’s what they are working to get to,” Quijas said. “They have to always be striving for excellence as far as today – not tomorrow – not the next day – not the next week – today.” The Army ROTC is designed to prepare the cadets to become officers. Each of them are pushed to reach excellence in every area of their life – from their school work to community service. One of the initiatives the organization helped lead is Fresno State’s first Veterans Week, which was officially kicked off by the Veterans 5K run Saturday and served as a fundraising event to help raise money for veterans. “What we operate off of is the servant-leadership mentality, which is to go out and find where the university or the community needs help and do it with a heart of giving and

Fresno State’s Army ROTC cadets visit developing nations over summer where they do volunteer work and gain cultural experience for the future. A select number of Army ROTC students are chosen to travel every summer with the Cultural Understanding and Language Proficiency (CULP) program, where they do humanitarian work as well as earn points towards their rank. “Army ROTC sponsors a trip called CULP, and basically they send a group of cadets, maybe one or two from each college in our brigade,” said Cadet Jordan Tarquinio of Fresno State’s Army ROTC, “and we go on a humanitarian trip or a ‘mil to mil’ which is military to military for one month.” Tarquinio went on a “mil to mil”, but did mostly humanitarian work because she said other countries militaries are lenient on what they can do with them. “The main goal of the program is for us to get more culturally diverse and get a sense of what the other part of the world is like and how other people view the world,” Tarquinio said. The CULP team that she traveled with went to Cabo Verde, Africa, which consists of ten small chains of islands. She said Cabo Verde is not economically well-off. “It was very surreal to see that people actually live this

See ROTC, Page 6

See CULP, Page 3


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