NEW LONDON, Conn.—Unlike other teens attending college orientations, Matt Panciocco’s first conversations with his new roommate were not about favorite sports teams, music or movies.
The 18-year-old from Walpole, Mass., barely had time to say hello and grab a pen early Monday before joining 291 other “swabs,” or incoming cadets, to report at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy.
Members of the Class of 2015 were sworn in Monday and started their seven-week “swab summer,” a notoriously difficult boot-camp regimen of academic and physical training intended to transform them from everyday teens into potential Coast Guard officers.
It’s the most diverse class in the academy’s history, with one-third of swabs coming from minority groups. One-third also are female.
It’s also one of the most academically accomplished classes, having been culled from more than 2,300 applications. They included almost 1,600 applicants whose standardized test scores, grade-point averages and class ranks made them among the nation’s top achievers.
On Monday, though, the 292 swabs were equal: nervous newcomers in their freshly issued CGA outfits, their training books in hand and their eyes on constant watch for upperclassmen to whom they must defer.
“I came into it knowing what I was getting into, so it hasn’t been that bad so far,” Panciocco said Monday as an academy barber brushed the last loose hairs from his newly shaved head after the mandatory haircut—a tradition which, for women, is replaced by training on how twist their hair up into tight buns to keep it off their collars.
Starting with calisthenics at 5:45 a.m. and ending with “Taps” and lights-out at 10 p.m., the swabs will spend their next seven weeks in everything from advanced math refresher courses to military training, sea survival classes and etiquette lessons.
And, of course, they’ll get yelled at—a lot, probably, by the older cadets who’ve been tasked with the tough training intended to turn them into a team.
“It’s intense,” 19-year-old Nickolette Morin of Thompson, Conn., said of the first day of swab summer. She had a good idea of what it entailed, though, from going through a one-week introductory program during high school.
“What’s different is that it’s real life this time and counts for a lot more, so the nerves are there,” she said Monday during a brief break from the drills and training that started as soon as swabs arrived on campus with their families.
Morin and other members of the Class of 2015 are the first to enroll under the leadership of new Superintendent Rear Adm. Sandra Stosz, the first woman to lead one of the nation’s five military service academies. Stosz, a 1982 graduate of the academy, told an auditorium full of parents, grandparents and family members that the swabs are about to be challenged like never before.
Many will probably call or write home with anxiety and regret a few times during the toughest days this summer over whether they made the right choice, Stosz and other administrators warned.
“There are times when it’s tough, but that’s exactly what we’re here to do: to transform your son or daughter into that leader of character,” she said. “If they pursue their passion and they persevere, they will make it through swab summer, they will make it as cadets and they will graduate four years from now.”
The academy has about 1,030 cadets in its four-year program. Students graduate with a bachelor of science degree and an obligation to serve five years in the Coast Guard. Many, like Stosz, make it their career—though no matter how many decades pass, they never forget the rigors and rewards of swab summer, they said.
“Once you start to adjust and get used to the swab summer lifestyle and pace, it does get easier,” said Peter Imbriale of Jamestown, R.I., the regimental commander and senior cadet in charge of swab summer, in which he participated just a few years ago as a newcomer, too.
As Monday’s events started wrapping up, some parents admitted to their own jitters as they prepared to say goodbye and leave their sons and daughters in the academy’s care.
Mike and Panan Leemon, who are Baptist missionaries based primarily in Thailand, said they felt confident their son, 19-year-old David, was ready to weather the summer’s pace: “I think he’s prepared even more than he realizes,” Mike Leemon said.
And 18-year-old swab Stephen Davis, from Colorado Springs, Colo., was holding his mother to her promise to keep her emotions in check.
“We all had a cryfest before I left Colorado and I told my mother, ‘No crying today,’ and she’s held up pretty good,” Davis said.
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