In August 2018, Schroepfer came to VMI as an assistant professor. “I thought more education could not hurt my résumé, but it wasn’t until I started writing my dissertation that I seriously considered becoming a professor.” I used these recordings to write a thumbnail grammar of an undocumented dialect and study the linguistic variation in their accents.” So, I would sit in kiosks, shops and people’s homes and record stories they would tell about life in southern Egypt. “I made it my mission to document the dialect. Many of those positions required a master’s degree, and I pursued mine at the University of Texas.” Those three years of study included a year at the American University in Cairo – during which he applied his military language training to investigating the dialect spoken in southern Egypt. “I got interested in the systems behind language in college and decided that was what I wanted to do for a job whether that was working for a private company like YouTube or working for the government. Schroepfer decided to continue his studies in Arabic. After graduating with highest distinction in December 2009, he was faced with another choice. There, he majored in Near East languages and literature, focusing on Arabic and Persian. Accepted at all of them, he decided to go to the University of California, Berkley. So, I figured I would do something that would keep me home, and I settled on getting a bachelor’s degree.”Īfter a year of ensuring he had all the required courses and with an associate degree he had earned at the DLI in hand, he applied to a number of universities in his home state. “I had been married for three years, but only one year total at home. However, that would have meant continuing to spend long stretches of time away from home. He planned to go directly into contracting, using his expertise and experience with Arabic. During his first deployment, he split his time “evenly between people and documents.” His second deployment with 1st Radio Battalion concentrated on signals intelligence. After that, he was chosen to study the version of Arabic spoken in Egypt for another four months. Schroepfer took the required the Defense Language Aptitude Battery that he describes as “a test that provides you with a little information about made-up languages and you have to decipher what it means.” His performance set him further apart, qualifying him to study “the most typologically different languages for English speakers such as Arabic, Chinese and Korean.”Īt the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, he joined one of the two platoons of students then learning Arabic and embarked on 60 weeks of intensive training. His recruiter informed him that his score allowed him to pursue “the most intellectually rigorous jobs that the Marine Corps had to offer,” to include being a linguist. As they told me about what they had experienced in boot camp and beyond, I became even more interested in what the Marines offered.” In his senior year in high school, “9/11 happened, and that played an additional role in my decision to enlist in 2002.”Īs to becoming an Arabic military linguist, he admits, “I sort of fell into the job.” Like all enlistees, he took the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery. Schroepfer recalls, “I visited them in their barracks and got an idea of what life was like for them. After their training, they were stationed at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar in eastern San Diego County. In 2000, some friends enlisted in the Marine Corps after they graduated from high school. “When I tell people it is in San Diego County, they picture beaches,” he said, “but it’s in the high desert.” Schroepfer grew up in Ramona, California, a small town in the eastern foothills of the Laguna Mountains. How did this come to pass? As with most intriguing stories, it’s best to start at the beginning.
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