April 29,
2004

Annual camp offers students chance to teach leadership skills

Carson Miller
Norwich Guidon Staff Writer

For Benjamin Brewster, the opportunity was too good to pass up.

Brewster recently learned that he will be one of the few member of the Corps of Cadets who will serve as a counselor in this summer's Future Leaders Camp.

The Norwich University Corps of Cadets, along with the admissions department, conducts a summer leadership camp on the Northfield campus every summer. The Future Leaders Camp is hosted by the university and focuses on indoctrinating, training, and molding 80 students into successful leaders. Counselors for this camp are drawn from both the Corps of Cadets and civilian student population. This year's team of counselors includes two returning counselors and eight new counselors. They are rising juniors and seniors who have experience in one or more of a variety of activities taught at the camp.

Benjamin Brewster, a sophomore history major from La Plata, Md., applied to be a leader and was accepted into the program as a counselor. Brewster applied to be a counselor because he was, "Looking for an opportunity to demonstrate leadership and practice leadership this summer in preparation for next year as a junior in the Corps of Cadets.

"I was also looking for summer work, and this seemed to be the one thing that perked my interest most. It is a great program with a great premise, and I am really excited about being able to influence high school students," Brewster said.

"I hope to be able to come here and focus on building leaders and turn people on to Norwich and possibly coming here as rooks when they graduate high school," Brewster said.

The competition for counselor slots was just as tough as the competition to be accepted as a participant in the summer leadership camp. All applicants were interviewed by admissions personnel and had to submit a resume that had to include extracurricular activities focused on the training aspect of the program.

"Those of us that were selected as counselors all went through personal interviews," Brewster said. "We had to be in academic good-standing with our ROTC unit and the corps of cadets as well as good-standing with the university."

Stephen Hopkins, a junior criminal justice major from Wuerzburg, Germany, will be acting as a counselor for the first time this summer.

"Right now, I do a lot of work with the admissions office, and this whole program is tied through the recruiting stage which works with the admissions office," Hopkins said. "It's something for me to do. It looks good on my resume, and it's something that I am interested in doing. I like working with high school students."

The Leadership Challenge weekends that are held on campus four weekends out of the year are similar to the Future Leader Camp. The main difference is that the Leadership Challenge weekends are the Future Leader Camp condensed into one weekend.

Stephanie Tavss, a junior communications major from Pembroke, Fla., will be the assistant operations officer for this year's Future Leader Camp.

"I help set up everything and make sure everything runs smoothly," Tavss said. This will be her second year as a member of the counselor team for the camp.

"The kids are a lot of fun," Tavss said.

The counselors are paid $400 a week for the six weeks that they are counselors.

"It's really a lot of fun, and we get paid pretty good," Tavss said.

"The job of the counselor is basically to mentor students in conducting tasks as a leader, going through the day making sure that one person out of that team serves as the team leader, and that person is in charge of making sure that everyone on their team is where they're supposed to be, so on and so forth, have all of their supplies and things of that nature," Hopkins said.

"The counselors have to go through two weeks of training prior to the camp beginning," Hopkins said. "We receive classes in areas that we are going to be teaching the students. For instance, we are going to be taught how to tie ropes and create rope bridges. We are all going to make sure that we are qualified in CPR."

The counselors will have to be prepared physically as well as mentally for the month-long camp they will host. Being physically fit, themselves, is a main quality that all of the team leaders have. The incoming students are also required to be fit and mentally stable.

Requirement for admission into the camp as students is competitive because of the limited number of slots (80).

"The students have to have a 2.5 GPA or better. They have to submit a resume, as well," Hopkins said.

"The students, themselves, are rising sophomores, juniors, and seniors in high school. We try to get more seniors that have applied to Norwich than not," Hopkins said. "They have to compete at their high school level to get into the camp,"

Those students who apply to this camp are interested in the variety of activities that it offers. Students are also accepted for their participation in high school and their communities as leaders.

The camp will teach concepts of leadership and train students to be better leaders. "Most importantly, we are going to focus on leadership and how to lead your peers and those traits and skills and characteristics one needs to lead others," Brewster said.

Cost for the camp is $1,325, which includes their uniforms.

"They are going to learn wilderness survival skills, how to build outside shelters and encampments," Brewster said.

"It is a month long program but it operates in two-week sessions. The first two weeks of July is one session and the last two weeks are another session," Hopkins said. "The first week, there are different things going on in the morning, whether it be the rappel tower or the obstacle course. In the evening, they have a class on leadership, and each day there is a new team leader assigned."

"They go on a field training exercise up Dole Hill, and they learn how to build shelters and survival skills, and they do one-rope bridges, and they do the rappel tower and the climbing wall," Tavss explained.

"During the second week of their experience, there are going to be a couple competitions. One of the activities is running up to the top of Paine Mountain and back down as a team as fast as they can while navigating the trails that wind back and forth to the top of the mountain," Hopkins said, adding, "[There] will also be a drill competition and a skit where they talk about their counselors, or maybe another team's counselor."

"We will be staying in Gerard Hall as well as a lot of the time outdoors," Hopkins said.

The participants are issued MREs (meals ready to eat) nine times during the camp, because a lot of time is spent outside in the woods, training. The rest of the time, they eat in the chow hall.

Hopkins said, "[It is the counselor's job to] make sure that the team leaders are doing all of those things, and everything [is] prepped for whatever they have going on."

This program is not the same as the regular Norwich rook week.

"We won't be getting all in their faces and things of that nature. It's not 100 percent relaxed, but it is relaxed in that we are not going to be treating them like we treat our freshmen when they come in for rook week," Hopkins said.

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