What are the specifics of OCC?

Question

Can anyone one provide the lowdown on the Marine's Officers Candidate Course? What is the 10-week (Senior/Graduate) schedule like? What are the obligations? Are there any other courses other than the Summer, like in the Fall or Winter?

Any other miscellaneous/additional information would be appreciated.

Answer 1

To get a good description of the schedule that comprises 10 weeks of training you should speak with a fresh 2ndLt at your OSS (Officer Selection Station). If you want a rough example of certain days or a rough course breakdown, shoot me an e-mail and I’ll get you a better answer than the following.

Day to day it’s usually: wake 0400-0500 (depending on billet and whether or not you need to see the corpsman), 0500-0530 “hygiene time”, 0530-0630 chow or PT (if PT, it is usually followed by chow, then 1-3 hours of classroom instruction, field exercise, or something to that effect, afternoon chow, more classroom instruction, field work, drill, etc, followed by more stuff before evening chow. After evening chow it’s usually just “CO Cmdr’s time” or something like that which is usually just instruction from the staff, weapons maintenance, or studying. If you’re lucky and have been flying the entire day you may get some ‘free time’ at night to square your trash away. For the most part, expect to be a ninja after lights out and get your trash done at that time (it’s great to get that first fire watch since you’ll be awake to square your trash away afterwards).

Obligations? This question is ambiguous, please explain what you mean by obligations.

There is a fall class (Currently OCC-199, I believe) which is contracting now and ships early October. There is also a winter class that begins January if you like spending 10 weeks frozen.

I’ll be glad to toss you some advice and knowledge if you let me know what kind you want.

Good tip: Get in good with the head scribe so they or your platoon billet-holders don’t s***w you on the fire watch SOG/COG schedule. Also, don’t go to medical unless it’s serious because going there for minor problems will get you a fair to serious amount of resentment from the platoon staff and your peers (even if it’s serious you’ll still be resented but it beats becoming completely broken by not taking care of it).