This New Scholarship Program Is Helping Cadets March Into Their Futures

Mackenzie Cronin ’27 credits Texas A&M University’s Corps of Cadets for helping her take her confidence, leadership skills and network to the next level.

For example, as a member of Texas A&M’s elite 11-member Ranger Challenge Team, Cronin has traveled to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point to participate in the Sandhurst Military Skills Competition. There, she’s competed against national and international teams in military skills such as rucking, weapons assembly and disassembly, shooting, grenades, obstacle courses, and maneuvering rigid inflatable boats. “It was great to meet so many different people and trade patches with the international teams,” she said.
 

Extending the Legacy

The Corps 1876 Scholarship program celebrates the special place that the Corps of Cadets continues to hold at the heart of Texas A&M. While undergoing changes that mirrored society over the course of its 150-year history, the Corps remains the keeper of the university’s hallowed traditions while preparing cadets to serve through embodying the Aggie core values.

Faced with the challenges of a rapidly changing world, Corps leadership has strived to upgrade and deepen experiential learning opportunities, which serve as a one-of-a-kind leadership laboratory for cadets. These Aggies can immediately apply these lessons in the Corps as well as through leadership roles that touch academic departments and student groups alike, thus stretching the Corps’ influence across the university’s campus.
 

Serving in the Corps while at Texas A&M continues to be a source of pride for John, who followed in the footsteps of his cadet cousins. “John was determined to get the education that you get from the Corps. He was not going to get bad grades or let any of the Garcia family down,” Kathleen said. “Starting as a junior, he was targeted to be on the Air Force group’s leadership and served on the wing staff and as a Ross Volunteer. He also was a scholastics officer because he had the best grades in the entire outfit.”

Taking a retrospective view, John credits the Corps for teaching him about responsibility and accountability and providing the discipline to focus on his grades to graduate with a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering technology.

He’s continually applied the Corps’ lessons throughout his career, including most recently as owner and managing director of Alpha Facilities Solutions LLC in San Antonio. “It all comes back to leadership and relationships: the relationships among those you trust and the system within which you gained all those relationships and leadership skills,” John said. “Once exposed to the real world, you realize you have to rely more on the relationships and leadership skills you’ve learned, and you have to continue to build and nurture that set of skills while also helping those around you build them throughout their careers and life. That learning cycle builds upon what we all experience as members of the Corps and Aggies.”

The couple has also proudly watched the experience their middle daughter, Kimberley, had in the Corps. She’s used that experience, including playing saxophone in the Fightin’ Texas Aggie Band, to create a thriving career as a Nashville-based country music artist.

Wanting future Aggie generations to have similar experiences, the Garcias had no hesitation when they heard about the Corps 1876 Scholarships. “Hundreds and thousands have preceded me in the Corps, and many others have come after my experience,” John said. “While everybody grows up when they go to school, the Corps, as a highly disciplined training environment, accelerates it at a rapid rate. It was a high-growth experience, and I wouldn’t change it for anything. And we want to give others the same type of opportunity.”