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A 2.001 GPA, then journalism
Probation and a pivot
William McRaven started in pre-med, which did not go well, then moved to accounting, which went even worse. At the end of his sophomore year, his naval science professor told him he wasn't doing too well. At a 2.0, a student goes on academic probation.
He had always enjoyed writing, so he tried the school of journalism. He had a knack for it, and it wasn't engineering, math, or accounting. It was something he could do and enjoyed doing, so he finished his last two years there.
A rare exception
That choice nearly didn't exist. Only a small percentage of ROTC and academy students are allowed into the humanities or liberal arts, because the services are very technical. His professor decided that if he was going to save the career, he would have to give it a chance at something other than math and science.
The payoff in uniform
In uniform the degree paid off. Officers spend a lot of time briefing and writing reports, and journalism school, including its radio, television, and film classes, taught him to stand in front of senior officers and brief them comfortably. Writing came simply to him. It did not come that simply to his engineering counterparts.
Why did service academies favor engineering?
The tradition goes back to West Point under Superintendent Sylvanus Thayer in the early 1800s. Thayer modeled the school on France's École Polytechnique, which had a strong mathematics and engineering curriculum. For decades West Point was among the first American schools teaching engineering, and its graduates built roads, bridges, and railroads. That technical weighting shaped the officer programs that followed.
Why do journalism and military writing overlap?
Journalists write in an inverted pyramid, with the most important facts first and the detail trailing behind. Military staff writing uses a close cousin called bottom line up front, which puts the conclusion in the first sentence. Both forms exist for readers who have little time and may stop reading early. The inverted pyramid became common in American newspapers in the late 1800s.
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