ISU Army ROTC continues its trend of keeping themselves to a higher standard by performing well at the Leadership Development Assessment Course.

Every summer, all cadets who have completed their junior year participate in the Leadership Development Assessment Course.  The rigorous four-week program in Fort Lewis, Wash., includes evaluations of physical fitness, communication, leadership skills, land navigation skills, weapons training and other similar subjects.

The Leadership Development Assessment Course is considered by many to be the most important training event for a cadet and how well cadets do at the course is a large deciding factor in determining if the program would receive other awards, such as the MacArthur Award.

“We did extremely well; it helped us get number one in the brigade, and helped us get the MacArthur award,” said Lt. Col. Richard Smith, professor and chair of military science and the tactics department.

Just by looking at the numbers, ISU Army ROTC exceeded expectations with how well they performed at the Leadership Development Assessment Course.

“A platoon has 40 to 50 people in it, five squads and there’s about 10 to 12 each squad, five platoons per company, two companies per regiment, 14 regiments, so there’s only 140 spots for number one in platoon and we had seven. There’s major 273 schools, so we had more than our fair share of number one’s,” Smith said.

Smith knew that the cadets were capable of achieving significant accomplishments in the Leadership Development Assessment Course, but the cadets raised the bar for themselves yet again.

“We were blessed with how well our kids did. I knew we would have some top five in the platoon; I did not think we would have seven number ones in the platoon,” Smith said. “It shows we did something right; there’s something that we did in the training that the system the model that we have works, the way we do it in the school year works.”

That same model helped several cadets achieve great accomplishments at the Leadership Development Assessment Course, including Trevor Thein, who achieved first in regiment.

“As you can see from the results we’re one of the best in the nation, we spend a lot of time training and we even spend time in the summer training, so they did a great job prepping me,” said Thein, senior in interdisciplinary studies.

Thein said succeeding at the Leadership Development Assessment Course means a lot and can lead to more opportunities in the future.

“It’s a high-level achievement, and only 14 people out of around 6,000 did it this summer, so it’s a great accomplishment it means a lot to me and it looks good and sets me apart from my peers and helps me get the job that I want,” Thein said.

ISU Army ROTC’s success in this year’s Leadership Development Assessment Course has only raised the already high standard the program holds itself too.

“Its one of those things where we’ve done so well throughout the past years not just this last year, that it’s a standard that we look to uphold from year to year now,” Thein said. “So we train that much harder every year to keep it because we don’t want to go down the ladder, we only want to go up.”