“I’m the third-string goalkeeper on the soccer team so I hadn’t done a ton of running, so I’d go on runs by myself and with friends with the pack. Two days before I went I shaved my own hair. That was a mental step for me,” he said.

Still, his platoon started PLC Combined with 85 men and ended with just 75.

“The toughest part was tough. You get yelled at constantly. You have to be upbeat. Complaining is just bad for you and annoys everyone else in the group,” he said. “We had LRC, Leadership Reaction Course. I never successfully completed the tasks, but it’s about being able to keep calm and make the right decisions, even if they don’t solve the problem. The gunnery sergeants would try to fluster you all the time. They’d scream and yell to see if, once you messed up, you could recover or if you would wilt.”

“We had to demonstrate initiative every day. It’s a bedrock driving force,” said Geanakoplos. “I’m driven, but I always felt initiative was a weakness, and something I wanted to work on.”

Jack Swanson ’22 grew up in rural North Carolina, where two-thirds of his class went to work, trade school, or the military after high school. He had planned to enlist in the Marine Corps before College, but his early decision acceptance and the accompanying financial aid package gave him the space to think more deeply about military service.

“My freshman year I realized the military was something I still wanted to do. I’m involved in a lot of organizations on campus, and I didn’t want ROTC to crowd my schedule so I started looking at different resources. I reached out to 50 or so people in the Harvard alumni directory and heard back from a dozen, some of whom I still talk to today,” he said.

He applied for the two six-week intensive program held during two sequential summers and said COVID made it both better and worse.

“Everything was canceled anyway, so the Marine Corps was one of the few things to do, but seven weeks is a long time to be in a bubble. Normally by the fourth or fifth week, you get liberties. You can use the phone, or meet in the outside world, but because of COVID, they cut us off from everything,” the government concentrator said.

The middle of five children raised by a single mom, Swanson’s do-it-yourself attitude helped him through moments of doubt.

“I knew why I was there. I wanted to prove myself, but you would still get questions from superiors, and no answer was good enough. Or you would wake up at 2 a.m. and go on an all-day hike with a 50-pound bag and not eat all day,” he said. “There was a lot of pride in finishing, but also humility in questioning why you were there and [whether you] have the resolve to finish.”

Swanson thinks more Harvard students “would join if they knew they could do this program and serve and get back out in the civilian world to do what they want to do.”

“The military can be a great leadership opportunity. I’ve gotten a lot of emails from first-years, and I’m always happy to talk to them,” he said. “There is a lot of pressure to get that internship, secure that job after College, chase the next step. Signing that paperwork my sophomore year really gave me a sense of freedom I hadn’t felt before. It opened me up to really focus on what I want to focus on.”

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