I got a little heads-up today of what to expect from MARS III (which has a 30% failure rate)... and it's going to be brutal. Academic phase should be fairly decent--7 weeks of classes and self-study, with some free time--but the sea phase will be insane... do three shifts a day (FixO, NavO, OOW), plus chart work, plus other random stuff, then pull into port (or just anchor somewhere) and do chartwork until the week hours. Fun. And then there'll be the simulator phase which culminate with assessed runs. Kinda like sea phase, but not as bad.
There's a lot of stuff I'll have to learn, and a lot of things to just get used to (not the least being the uber-stress of bridgework, or so I'm told). I did love that little bit of 2/3OOW work we did on NETPO, but I have no illusions as to how much it's like the real thing.
Long-term, I'm WAY more scared of the basic submarine officer course, because even us MARS types have to know all the engineering stuff, on top of being top-notch at EVERYTHING. Still, I keep being told that if MARS is what you actually want to do, it's a breeze (relatively speaking) to pass MARS III/IV and that the submarine stuff isn't all that hard after you've passed the Lt(N) boards.
I guess I'll just have to take it one day at a time... starting with the rest of this semester.
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