ROTC cadet focuses on the future with help from Virginia Tech Advantage

My name's Jerry McCoy. I'm a cadet here at Virginia Tech. I'm a business management major, entrepreneurship, innovation, and technology, and I'm in Air Force ROTC. The Presidential Scholarship Initiative is a scholarship that offers the opportunity to people that have financial need and have leadership potential to be able to come to school without having to pay tuition and give them that opportunity to kind of skip past that financial hardship so that they can reach where they want to be. My education would absolutely not be possible to this caliber. The type of training that they give us is nothing like a regular ROTC anywhere else, and there's only six of them in the country, so I couldn't have afforded it anywhere else. It's been amazing. When I first came here, it was a shell shock because so many different cultures and learning just about connecting with so many different types of people as well as coming into a new training environment and seeing how I needed to step outside of my comfort zone to become the leader that I needed to be for my folks once I get into the Air Force. The advisors, they dig in and make sure that I'm on track to graduate. They make sure that everything's going good in my personal life as well. They're really kind of my liaison for anything that I need as far as finances go. Yeah, PSI has definitely helped me to be more prepared for my career going forward and has also given me the inspiration, the desire to give to folks when I get out of here as well and hopefully have an endowed scholarship moment. Folks need to understand that not everybody gets the opportunities that we have here and we're very fortunate to get these opportunities. Virginia Tech wants you to have that opportunity.