The Army ROTC Scholarship Interview is a very, very important part of the overall determination of whether or not you receive a scholarship. The interview itself counts for 200 points out of 1,400 points, or about one-seventh, of the overall evaluation. Plus, there's a board score, meaning that a board of officers, usually lieutenant colonels, look at the... interview closely in giving their overall score of the candidate. So when you look in total about how much the interview counts for Army ROTC, my estimate it's between about 25 to 30 percent of the overall evaluation.
So it's a very, very important thing to do well on. You can prepare for this interview and prepare effectively. The Army ROTC person is interviewing you, usually a professor of military science who's a Army Lieutenant Colonel, Army ROTC does not require them to go by a script or to ask you a specific question. What I'm giving you here today is just a general idea of what they're going to be asking you so that you can prepare effectively. Now, you may not get this particular question that they're going to be asking, but you're probably going to get something close to it.
One of the questions that they're probably going to ask you is, why do you want to be an Army officer? What they're trying to get at there is your knowledge of the U.S. Army. and why you're there today to interview to become an officer candidate. They're interested in your motivation.
They then may ask you a question about your knowledge of Army ROTC. What do you know about Army ROTC? What is motivating you to do Army ROTC, say, than many of the other options that you have to become an officer in the United States military? So those kind of questions, the first one I mentioned about the Army and then Army ROTC, are getting at your knowledge of both the Army and Army ROTC.
ROTC. And then they're going to shift probably to questions about leadership. They're going to ask you about the time that you led others in a project or a goal.
They want to get an idea of what type of leader are you? Are you comfortable with leading other people? Are you a person that seeks out leadership?
Is that something that you do? Some of the other questions that they may ask you about a time that you failed at something, time where you had a setback. Are you a resilient person?
Are you a person who, if you have a setback such as an injury or you didn't do so well in a class or maybe you had a personal or family setback, how did you respond to that? They want to know because in the United States Army, you're probably going to be getting setbacks. As a cadet, you're going to be in challenging circumstances.
So have you demonstrated this resilience where you have overcome those obstacles? Finally, they may ask you a question about... if you faced a moral or ethical challenge. Remember that one of the army values is honor and another value is integrity. So they're interested in knowing if you've ever faced a situation where you've had an integrity issue, one maybe where a friend had an integrity issue, and how you responded to it.
Given these kind of questions that you can expect, you can prepare ahead of time for these questions by thinking of examples in your own life that these situations happened or an example of when you've had them. a leadership experience. And then with the earlier question about ROTC and the Army, do your research. Go online and do your research on the web.
Go visit an Army ROTC program. Learn about the Army through asking officers or maybe your local Guard or Reserve officers that you know so that you can become knowledgeable about. the Army and Army ROTC. So if you do those kind of things, that's going to get you much closer to having that really great interview that's going to get you that scholarship that you're looking for. And good luck to you.