“Commitment, integrity, accountability, loyalty and service before self.”
Pete Schoonover enlisted in the Marine Corps during his senior year of high school, inspired partly by his family’s tradition of military service and partly out of his own sense of patriotism, duty and love of country. His family’s record of service predates the United States as nation. He chose the Marines, he said wryly, because it was the only military branch that no one in his family had died serving in yet.
Schoonover wasted no time getting started. 38 hours after graduation, he was “standing on the yellow footprints at MCRD San Diego.”
Schoonover’s first military occupational specialty or MOS was as a machine gunner. He was stationed at bases across the United States during his 14 years of service and was deployed during Desert Storm and again to Somalia in the 1990s. He attended Linn Benton Community College while in the Reserves and finished his education at OSU. Eventually, he found his way to his current roles as a campus hazardous materials specialist and the hazardous waste/universal waste program lead with Environmental Health & Safety.
When asked how military service impacts the work he does today, Schoonover said that he learned how to set an example for others, how to give clear and detailed directions, how to take orders and how to give them.
“Teamwork grows from a sense of shared responsibility for the betterment of the team, organization and mission completion,” he said.
Schoonover said that one important requirement of the Marines was stepping up into leadership roles that you weren’t necessarily given a lot of formal training for.
“As Marines, we would have responsibilities and hold jobs that every other branch of the service would have commissioned officers doing, especially in troop handling or leadership positions,” he said.
The stereotype of sergeants screaming at the Marines under their command to get results wasn’t his style. He said that the key to getting excellent work out of the Marines in his charge was setting the right expectations from the beginning.
“Several years ago, a manager asked me, ‘Hey Pete, I bet you miss the Marines, being able to yell at people to get things done,’” he said. “I never had to yell at my Marines to complete a task. They knew what was expected of them and they did the task.”
Schoonover said he’d like to see more value placed on the training and expertise that military service provides when evaluating job applicants. While many high school graduates who enlist go to on to earn a college degree, military service alone provides a broad range of job experience and complex responsibilities that most young adults in civilian jobs don’t achieve until much later in their careers.
“Instead of attending college right after high school, most of us were responsible for millions of dollars worth of equipment and later in our careers, responsible for the personnel under us – the actual lives of people,” he explained.
Schoonover and the Hazardous Waste team were recently recognized for their excellent work by the Campus Safety, Health and Environmental Management Association (CSHEMA). Schoonover in particular was recognized for inventing two important tools that have improved safety and increased efficiency in his department. That shouldn’t surprise anyone who has heard him talk about the key principles he learned through military service.
“In the tradition of the Marine Corps,” he said, “improvise, adapt and overcome.”
