Family can be defined in many ways, but when you have a family like the NJROTC family, you forget all about other things and treat one another like family. I have been in the NJROTC program for four years now, and I enjoy every second of it. We have an after-school activity called the Drill Team. I am currently the overall commander of the drill team. We are always together and we spend about eight hours a week training and practicing with each other. I spend more time with them than with my actual family. I can honestly consider each and every one of them as family. We meet in the NJROTC classroom everyday after-school, our headquarters. NJROTC is a military based program, so when we are practicing and performing, we are professional. When we aren't doing that, we are acting like a family and bonding with each other. Even though we range from freshmen to seniors, we get along with everyone equally.
Honor, courage, and commitment are the core values that we NJROTC cadets follow. We have a responsibility of always obeying these core values and we also have the integrity to speak up and admit if we ever broke the core values. In NJROTC, we work in a quasi-military structure with a chain-of-command. We have superior officers that have been in the program for four years, all the way down to the new cadets that joined the program yesterday. Everyone is treated the same way, no matter how high in rank their position is. I am the overall NJROTC Drill Team Commander and over one hundred NJROTC students are members of the Drill Team. Since I have been in the program for four years, I have built up enough knowledge to reteach it to all new cadets and also to the upperclassmen. I have experienced many things that others haven't, and I make sure that they know my mistakes so they don't make the same ones. I have been in charge of many things including weapons, flags, clothing, and many other government properties.
