What does it really take to become an Eagle Scout

                         




        The road to becoming an Eagle scout can be long and painstaking. It requires meticulous attention to detail at times and tenacity to not give up. However, the eventual outcome of staying on this path is extremely rewarding. There are many clubs and sports that you may have begun when you were 8 or 10 years old that you may drop as you grow up. Many kids drop out of Scouts along the way because not every meeting or every campout is so much fun and I guess they get bored. The difference is that if your goal is to become an Eagle Scout, you have to stay the course. Along this journey, you will learn many lifelong skills. You will learn skills such as CPR, survival in the wilderness, and cooking and camping in the wilderness that will be useful for you the rest of your life. The main requirement to getting to Eagle is earning 21 merit badges. A merit badge is like a mini class that you complete to a level of proficiency and each one takes a different amount of time. There are merit badges in swimming, camping, life-saving, citizenship in the community, citizenship in the nation, cooking, and personal management just to name a few. The merit badges require different hours of time to be put into it and different tests at the end. Cooking for example, requires you to cook 3 meals and document them as well as send in the recipe and list of ingredients. To earn the camping merit badge you need 21 nights of camping under the stars. What that means is that you must have slept in a tent and not a cabin which is sometimes an option. That is not easy to get up to 21 nights because you might do 3 in the fall/winter and 3 in the spring. You may have also gone to summer camp, but you are not allowed to use those nights for your tally. The swimming merit badge is one of the very first merit badges that every Scout earns. For that one you will undergo a week of training in swimming. The test at the end will make sure that you can swim one lap of the Olympic size pool and tread water for 3 minutes. That merit badge is the very first one you will get out of the way because it’s a matter of safety when you are up at camp since there is a pool and a lake up there.  



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