The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Middle East District,
welcomed a cadet into the fold as part of the Cadet Troop Leader Training
Internship Program, and wished him farewell August 25.
Hunter Tuttle, an Army Reserve Officer Training Corps cadet,
spent several days shadowing employees in the Winchester, Va., office, learning
about a different project each day, before traveling to Kuwait for a week.
Tuttle, a student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, is an
aerospace engineering major entering his junior year. This was his first
experience working with the Army, and he said it was better than he expected.
“In ROTC, you make a branch preference list in your junior
year,” he said. “This solidified my decisions for my first and second choices
to be active duty engineers and reserve engineers.”
Tuttle said the job shadowing helped him understand where
each department in the organization fits with his career path. In addition to
narrowing down his branch preferences, his goals for his internship included learning
the mission of the district and understanding the opportunities available to
Army engineers.
In Kuwait, Tuttle got a small taste of deployment life when
he stayed in the military barracks. He visited a runway repair project, and a
warehouse project, and said the warehouse was bigger than he could have
imagined. But, he said, the pier building project was “the coolest thing I
saw.”
On his last day, Tuttle gave his capstone presentation,
sharing what he learned with the commander, deputy commander and section
chiefs.
Col. Vincent Quarles, commander of the Middle East District,
said he was happy to show Tuttle some of the opportunities within the Corps.
“Now you’ve seen how the relationships we build with our
customers contributes to our overall national security,” Quarles said. “The
things you saw are allowing support to continue to flow to our warfighters. I
love being able to provide that support they need to get the job done.”
Tuttle summed up his internship as eye-opening.
“The thing that stood out to me the most was the teamwork,”
Tuttle said. “Here, there are so many people doing different jobs, but over in
Kuwait there are so few people that the project engineer has to take on so many
different roles. The teamwork and communication aspect of that really impressed
me.”