OGDEN — Some people thought it was unusual when three 2006 graduates of tiny St. Joseph Catholic High School went to the U.S. Naval Academy together four years ago.
Those same three students will be continuing their education together again — this time in flight school.
Ryan Gilbert, Kristin Hope and Jake Ries were selected in 2006 to receive a four-year Naval Academy experience worth up to $300,000, including tuition, housing, food, books and uniform at the academy in Annapolis, Md.
Now all three have chosen to continue on to flight school, with Hope and Gilbert aiming to be Navy pilots and Ries a Marine pilot.
“That’s crazy,” Hope said about the trio heading to flight school. “It’s so unheard of that all three of us would want the same service selection.”
Gilbert said it’s rare to have three graduates from their high school class of about 42 students to enter to the same flight school.
“It was pretty unusual for the three of us. It was pretty strange, because going forward, we do have so many options,” he said. “That all three of us are doing the same track — that’s pretty unusual. Usually, we kind of branch off. We all must have the same sort of attitude.”
The three will graduate from the Naval Academy in May.
Gilbert and Hope will head to Pensacola, Fla., in September, while Ries will go to another location to begin training as a Marine pilot, then head to the Pensacola flight school about six weeks later.
The path to get to flight school wasn’t easy, Hope said. When she initially went to the Annapolis as a plebe in 2006, she thought she may have made a mistake.
“It was kind a rude awakening, plebe summer. I got there, and all of a sudden, there were 12 guys screaming at me, and I was just, like, ‘I hate this,’ ” she said.
“We wear our white works (uniform), which makes you feel absolutely god-awful all summer, and it’s a lot of (physical training) and running and everything, and it’s the middle of the summer in Maryland, and I was not used to the humidity at all.”
Gilbert also said the first year was hard but a great experience overall.
“Of course, it has its up and downs. The first year is always the toughest year, getting used to the military lifestyle,” he said. “Once you got through the first year, you just hit cruise control after that. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed it.”
Having a few familiar faces in the crowd of 4,000 students was a plus, Gilbert said.
“I think it definitely helped out. It was a little bit different, obviously, going from a school of 200 people. We all knew each other very well. It was kind of a shock at first, but we kept in touch, so that was a nice bonus,” he said.
“We kind of went our separate ways throughout the four years. We live in the same dorm, but it’s massive — it’s like four miles long — but we still stayed in touch, and we meet every now and then.”
Hope said, if nothing else, having her classmates in the Naval Academy made her a little more competitive.
“It was comforting to have familiar faces, but at the same time, it bumped up the competition,” she said. “The last thing you wanted to do was be the one that didn’t make it.”
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