For most of the ROTC students at Iowa State, the program is the first step towards becoming an officer in their respective branch of the military.

These students come to college straight from high school and begin their learning process from scratch. But for a select few, college comes after military training and experience.

Six students in the Naval ROTC program, three Navy and three Marines, are at Iowa State on a path that takes men and women and sends them to school to earn a degree and become commissioned officers while remaining on active duty.

Marine Enlisted Commissioning Education Program (MECEP) is the program for Marines, and STA-21 is the program for the Navy. Active duty soldiers apply each year, but a select few are accepted. For the Navy, only 50 are accepted per year. The Marines don’t have a set number but the selection rate is around 50 percent.

Jared Chappelear enlisted in the Marines in 2009 after one semester at the University of Northern Iowa. From the minute he joined he knew the path he wanted to take.

“My boss’s husband was a Marine and he told me about MECEP, so my plan from the very beginning was to get selected for MECEP,” Chappelear said.

Chappelear commissioned in Dec. 2016, but doesn’t leave for Basic School until this coming June. Before being accepted into the MECEP program, he spent time in Afghanistan as part of Operation Enduring Freedom. Here at Iowa State, he double majored in political science and history.

While the Marine option does have high competition, the Navy STA-21 program reaches a different level of competitiveness seeing as they only accept 50 sailors a year.

Chad Skyberg is an officer candidate here and was inducted into the STA-21 program in 2015.

“The Navy picks up 50 per year, 35 of those are nuclear officer pick-ups, and 15 from other communities, so those are very competitive,” Skyberg said. He falls under one of those 15 other categories.

Skyberg applied for the program twice before being accepted. He joined the Navy in 2006 out of high school and unlike Chappelear he didn’t have this goal in mind from the beginning.

“While at shore command in Virginia Beach, I stood out, I was requesting to the commanding officer to let me qualify further than my pay grade because I was trying to fulfill the roles of officers,” Skyberg said.

Those standout actions are what led Skyberg to want to apply for the STA-21 program and become an officer. His area in the Navy is oceanography and he is majoring in meteorology here at Iowa State.

For each the MECEP and STA-21 programs, once accepted Skyberg and Chappelear’s names were announced to both the Marines and Navy as a whole as men who would be going to school for commissioning.

The two had their choice of any college with a Navy ROTC program to apply to, but each chose Iowa State because of its proximity to their homes — Chappelear being from from Ankeny, and Skyberg from South Dakota.

“I was getting calls from USC and Arizona State because they want you to go to their school, but I said no, I’m coming home to Iowa,” Chappelear said.