Today my 14-year-old attended an all-day event for students planning to become doctors, the
AMSAARC Annual Pre-Med Conference. This event was required by his high school, where he's enrolled in a special academy for pre-pre-med students.
We just picked him up. He spent a good half hour unloading swag he picked up from the medical schools and associations attending the conference and telling us about the cool NIH program he'd like to attend in a couple of years.
NOT SO COOL, he said, were all the military recruiters. A number of his fellow 9th graders gave these recruiters their names, addresses, phone numbers, much to his dismay and despite his efforts to talk some sense into them. I guess that 14-year-olds are now fair game.
While I'm glad I didn't raise a fool -- my son told all the recruiters that there was no way he'd trust the claims and promises they made AND that he'd "talk their information over with my parents" (words that, I assume, strike fear in the heart of recruiters right now) -- I'm alarmed that the other children present were so easily duped into handing out their personal information.
Admittedly, the free gear handed out by the recruiters was the best at the conference: a nifty solar calculator and a very shiny travel mug from the Air Force and a stylish lanyard from the Navy among the dozens of brochures and writing implements he picked up today. Cool free stuff aside, are these very bright kids really that easily sucked in by nice uniforms and promotional giveaways?
I'm still not sure what to do about this. The conference wasn't intended for young high school kids, so I can't blame the recruiters for doing their thing when the kids walked up to their tables. Much.
As a sidenote, the brochure the Army recruiter handed my child was unintentionally, darkly hilarious:
Superior training is another reason why you should consider becoming an Army Physician. As a new Physician in the Army, you'll be exposed to a health care system that offers immediate hands-on experience, a diverse patient population [. . . ] and unique subspecialties and opportunities you may not find anywhere else.
Mmmm-hmmm.
The irony of the recruitment happening today was that we also just got our special election ballot information in the mail. Among CA's ballot initiatives: adding a parental consent requirement with a 48-hour waiting period for minors seeking abortions. Recruitment, that's no problem, though.
[editor's note, by marisa] Some of the commenters here have made reference to some supposed "elitist" subtext here. Please note that we've already got one kid in the Army (poised, as I type, to be stationed in Iraq with his unit for the next year) and don't intend to share any more with the military, at least until this morally-bankrupt administration is a bad memory. What this is really about is the cheesy recruiting tactics the military is employing on our children.