Taking on new challenges is nothing new for U.S. Marine Corps 1st Lt. Rebecca Claire Smith.
She came to the Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences and the Arts from the small town of Oden. Upon her graduation from ASMSA in May 2014, she enrolled in the Air Force Academy, earning her commission as an officer in 2018. Smith cross-commissioned to the Marine Corps after graduating from the Academy and was selected to become an artillery officer, rising through the ranks to most recently serve as a battery commander for 130-plus Marines.
Over the next three years, she will be taking on one of her greatest challenges — learning Portuguese and then earning a master’s degree at the University of Coimbra in Portugal as an Olmsted Scholar.
Olmsted Scholars are U.S. military officers who are chosen to learn a foreign language and pursue graduate studies in that language at a foreign university. The program is fully funded by The Olmsted Foundation, which was established in 1959 by Gen. George Olmsted. He was a U.S. Military Academy at West Point graduate who served in World War II and later reached the rank of major general. He was also a successful businessman in the insurance and banking industries as well as a philanthropist. He wanted to create an opportunity for active-duty military officers to learn a foreign language and pursue graduate studies in that language at a foreign university.
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Smith most recently served as a battery commander for an artillery unit at Marine Corps Base Hawaii in Oahu. As the time for her departure from that command approached, she decided to apply for the Commandant’s Career Level Education Board, which selects officers for special international and graduate programs such as the Marine Corps Expeditionary Warfare School, Foreign Area Officer program and The Olmsted Foundation.
She initially hoped to serve as a foreign area officer which would have allowed her to work toward three goals — attend graduate school, learn a language and live abroad. That was when she first learned about the Olmsted Scholar Program as another option.
“The Olmsted Scholar Program checked all these boxes, so I applied to it in addition to the Foreign Area Officer program and the Naval Post Graduate School,” Smith said. “Looking back, had I known more about the (Olmsted Scholar Program) it would have been an easy choice from the start.
“The great thing about the Olmsted Scholar Program is that you are on your own in a foreign country figuring out how to adapt and get into graduate school. Once you’re through that, you must take all of your classes in a language that you’ve only been learning for six to 12 months — six months in my case. There is no one there holding your hand to help you along your way. It is an amazing opportunity to grow and be challenged.”
Applicants for the program are given a list of 30-plus countries from which they pick a top 10. Smith said she initially had exclusively Eastern European countries on her list, but on her final list she decided to put Portugal as her number one “as a sort of ‘Hail Mary.’”
“I knew the Western European countries were highly sought after and truly did not believe that I would be chosen for Portugal, given that some of the other countries on my top 10 list probably didn’t make the top 10 for many others,” she said.
The application process to become an Olmsted Scholar includes taking the Defense Language Aptitude Battery to test the officer’s ability to learn languages, taking the GRE and submitting an essay as well as information about your professional accomplishments. The Marine Corps looks at the applications and nominates a certain number of Marines. This year, they nominated seven, including Smith. She was one of three Marines chosen for this year’s Olmsted Scholar cohort.
Smith knew she would be receiving a call announcing the decision on whether she was chosen for the program on a certain day.
“I had been nervously waiting for hours by the time they called,” Smith said. “I’ll never forget being told that not only was I selected but I was granted my number one choice: Coimbra, Portugal. I immediately called my parents to tell them, and they were ecstatic, particularly that I had received Portugal.”
Smith is currently based at the Marine Corps University in Washington, D.C. as she prepares to begin her one-on-one daily lessons in European Portuguese at the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center in September. Upon her graduation from there in March, she will move to Coimbra, Portugal, to begin the next phase of the program.
Over the next six months, she will have an opportunity to take a 10-day trip to Coimbra to make contacts as the U.S. Embassy, her future school and within the community. Fortunately for her, there is a naval officer who is currently in Coimbra as part of the Olmsted Scholar Program at the same university she will be attending.
Once she’s in Portugal, she will be responsible for finding her own housing, paying bills and having intelligent graduate-level conversations in a language in which she will have had only six months of training.
“Being an Olmsted Scholar will broaden my world view in a way that is unparalleled by any other. I will effectively be ‘thrown into the deep end of the pool’ and must rise to the surface and thrive. The confidence in my abilities that these experiences will give me will ensure that I am ready for future challenges,” Smith said.
Smith studied German as a student at ASMSA and then later at the Air Force Academy. She said those studies bolstered her confidence in her ability to learn other languages and introduced her to foreign cultures.
“If I hadn’t studied German at ASMSA, I don’t think I would have ended up on this path,” she said.
She also encouraged current and future students interested in the military service academies to reach out to someone in each branch to hear about their experience before deciding which one to apply to. Regardless of the branch, however, choosing to attend a service academy is a special experience, Smith said.
“The service academies are an amazing opportunity to learn, grow and become an officer,” Smith said. “No service academy will be easy, and you won’t have the same experience as your classmates who attend civilian universities. It is a huge commitment and isn’t a decision that should be taken lightly.”
To learn more about The Olmsted Foundation, visit olmstedfoundation.org.