McCoy did not go to Starfleet Academy. The series makes it plain. After all, it was written by war veterans who knew how these things really worked.
Save that silliness for AbramsTrek.
Cadet James T. Kirk
- Thread starter James Wright
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McCoy did not go to Starfleet Academy. The series makes it plain. After all, it was written by war veterans who knew how these things really worked.
Save that silliness for AbramsTrek.
Really?
I recall it being established that McCoy had attended the University of Mississippi, but I don't recall it ever being established that he did not attend Starfleet Academy.
Most Doctors who join the military do not attend an academy. They just go through some officer training course. Both McCoys were qualified and experienced MDs when they joined Starfleet. They probably needed some sort of training in Starfleet procedures, rules and regulations, as well as deep space medicine and psychology. Technical training in the use of various pieces of Starfleet equipment might be required, too. These courses could very well be taught at Starfleet Academy.
That'd work very well, yes.
Kirk was a Cadet when taking the no-win scenario test, both in the ST2 backstory and in STXI. Saavik was not: she had already graduated to the rank of Lieutenant (jg). So we might argue that "what prompted Kirk to take the command path" was that his undergraduate subject of study was - command!
That'd make relatively good sense, too: if you know you only want to command, you study hard for that and take all the necessary courses and tests while undergraduate. If you are a bit more realistic and understand that there are few command openings for wet-behind-the-ears graduates, you study something to keep you afloat while you climb the command ladder, take postgraduate command courses and hope for an opening.
Given that Starfleet can teach Uhura the bulk of her profession in a matter of weeks in "The Changeling", one would assume that anybody spending four years at the Academy would be able to "major" in plenty of complex subjects like History, Cosmology, Alien Mating Rituals and Xenobeverages - while still graduating from something that's considered the Command Line.
Timo Saloniemi
But the Coast Guard Academy uses the term cadet for their students and it's certainly a naval type service.
The Ole Miss bit was from DS9. The strongest indication from the series McCoy didn't attend the Academy is his ignorance of the term "dunsel" and its meaning in "The Ultimate Computer". Kirk, Spock, Sulu, and Chekov all recognize it immediately. McCoy doesn't. Had he been an Academy grad, he undoubtedly would have.
^ And the way Spock explains it to him as "a term used by midshipmen at Starfleet Academy."
Plus McCoy having absolutely no idea what to do with Spock when the Vulcan surrenders himself to the doctor's custody in The Menagerie.
Plus McCoy having absolutely no idea what to do with Spock when the Vulcan surrenders himself to the doctor's custody in The Menagerie.
How'd McCOY become a commissiuned officer in Star Fleet if he didn't attend the Starfleet Academy, some kind of ROTC?
James
James
I don't know what process an M.D. goes through to enter the U.S. Navy today, but they don't go to Annapolis for four years. If I'm not mistaken, under the draft a doctor's education and experience brought them into the service as commissioned officers. I imagine circumstances today are similar. So, McCoy volunteered, went through Starfleet basic training, and entered service as an officer (Lieutenant?) but didn't attend the Academy.
And just where onscreen does this nugget of knowledge come from?Well, he was the tactical officer on the Farragut. So I guess tactic was his specialty.
The closest would be that he is described as the "officer on phaser duty" when the Cloud attacked but that could mean anything from he was on duty in the phaser control room to manning the helm to being part of the security detail on a landing party. Nothing that could be used to definitively identify him as Farragut's tactical officer. The most logical interpretation is he was simply standing that watch.
Oh, I was more or less relying on Memory Alpha with this. So excuse my omission of counter-checking what was actually said in the episode. Onscreen dialog states that Kirk was "the young officer at the phaser station", which sure makes him a tactical officer aboard the Farragut at the very least. He, too, could have been any other branch of officer who just happens to man the phaser station in that situation, but there's not much in the dialog to support that.And just where onscreen does this nugget of knowledge come from?Well, he was the tactical officer on the Farragut. So I guess tactic was his specialty.
That's our point. His being a tactical officer isn't actually established onscreen. Someone is just making an assumption. It isn't necessarily wrong or bad, but it isn't spelled out onscreen.Oh, I was more or less relying on Memory Alpha with this. So excuse my omission of counter-checking what was actually said in the episode. Onscreen dialog states that Kirk was "the young officer at the phaser station", which sure makes him a tactical officer aboard the Farragut at the very least. He, too, could have been any other branch of officer who just happens to man the phaser station in that situation, but there's not much in the dialog to support that.And just where onscreen does this nugget of knowledge come from?Well, he was the tactical officer on the Farragut. So I guess tactic was his specialty.
Yeah, okay, you're right. Whoever wrote that article on Memory Alpha just made the assumption that McCoy's words mean that Kirk was a tactical officer aboard the Farragut, while we actually can't say for sure that he was. (Although I reckon that the dialog is written in a way that suggests that he was a regular tactical officer manning the phaser station, instead of an officer who just happened to man the station in that situation.)
Probably just a quick program to bring him up to speed. The story goes he was already an MD when he decided to join, so ROTC is out (ROTC is part of college), but it is never explained on-screen so we are guessing.
Not that I'm against guessing, but you need to know that's what you are doing.
Not that I'm against guessing, but you need to know that's what you are doing.
"Tactical officer" isn't a term used in TOS, anyway, that was more of a TNG thing. In "Arena" "tactical people" are mentioned, but their official positions are vague. The actual fighting of the ship seemed to be handled by the helmsman, with, in later episodes, some kind of "scope" that he used when action was imminent. The phaser crews like Tomlinson in "Balance of Terror" seemed to handle the mechanics of operating the phasers, but weren't really in the loop of tactical decision-making with the captain.
"Obsession" makes it sound like Kirk did control firing phasers, which would be more of a helmsman duty by most of what we saw in TOS. Or, maybe there was a different arrangement on Farragut back then. But "tactical officer," yeah, that's just a guess.
--Justin
Well, only a tiny fraction of people in the US Military came from one of the Service Academies. As a result, their curriculum can be somewhat ... limited.
As far as I know, none of the US Service Academies offer a pre-med degree.
Thus, a Doctor in the Armed Forces got there one of two ways:
1) he went to college, majoring in pre-med, then went to Med School, completed his residency, and then joined the Military. He will be run through something like Basic Training for officers, and then through some kind of Officer Candidate School. Since he is a Doctor, he will enter at an advanced rank (O-3, which is Captain in the Army and Lieutenant in the Navy).
2) He went to college and med school in ROTC, which means the military paid for part of his school and he spent some of his spare time getting that Basic Training and OCS. Otherwise the same as above.
I don't know if it is possible to do one's Residency in the military or not.
Dr. Julian Bashir apparently went to Starfleet Academy and majored in pre-med: he'd always wanted to be a doctor, he joined Starfleet with the intention of being a doctor. He graduated from "Starfleet Medical" as second in his class, finished his Residency (not clear if this was before or after "graduation"), and then got posted to DS9 as a Lieutenant, Junior Grade. In the modern US military, it is impossible for a doctor to rank that low if he is serving as a doctor. (A person with an MD could, I presume, join the Navy and be an engineer instead if he so chose, and then he wouldn't get the automatic rank for being a doctor.)
So Starfleet is definitely different from how things work today.
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