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This may seem like a really stupid question, but what impact does ROTC have on the rest of the normal college life?

Meaning is it just the same, just with training ? or does the ROTC change things for the normal individual.

I guess what I'm getting at, is that I somewhat consider most colleges today a complete waste of time and money (and this coming from a college graduate). So much liberalism and socialism run amuck.

Of course, I am coming at the ROTC question from 20+ years ago, but ROTC was helpful for me in that it gave me a bit more discipline and motivation for the rest of my classes, and there was a camraderie in the ROTC cadet battalion that was both helpful and fun. In some ways (and this is a shallow comparison), the cadet battalion is like a fraternity, though there is no ROTC House where the cadets live. Well, in our case there was one dorm where about 25% of the cadets stayed, but that was not an official ROTC thing - we just did that ourselves. I understand some schools actually have a dorm specifically for ROTC cadets.

The actual ROTC work is handled during the school year as classes. The main impact was that those classes tended to be early morning classes, and I would be in uniform on those days. Some professors had a bit of a problem with that - the uniform pretty quickly becomes a magnet for that kind of pinhead. However, that was kind of good in a way in that these problem individuals identified themselves pretty quickly. I did not have any grade problems from these folks, so it was no skin off my nose.

Summers there are optional (and then later mandatory) 'summer camps', that are part basic training, part field exercise and part continuing officer education. Those were a blast; I learned as much or more from those 4 to 6-week sessions as I would from regular ROTC classwork.

For me, the impact on college was positive. I was in ROTC during the Reagan years, so there was a good amount of popular support for the uniform among the students. Many of the professors were former 60s liberals, but even they were for the most part supportive, or at least no openly antagonistic. Might be different on campus now, but I think that might be more a regional issue than a national question.

And also, that was NOT a stupid question. That really needs to be part of the decision process for ROTC; no sense doing it for a while and then quitting - learn as much as you can in advance and then the informed decision will usually be a good one.