By MATT CHITTUM
ROANOKE TIMES

"As long as I know I can make it, there's really nothing to prove," said Jen Jolin, who hopes to return to VMI.

Jen Jolin entered Virginia Military Institute's first coed class in August with the credo, "Quitting is not an option."

Tuesday, after watching demerits against her pile higher and higher, she took that option anyway. The freshman "rat" formally withdrew from the college.

"It seems like trouble has been following me everywhere the last few weeks," Jolin said from her home in Monterey.

Jolin decided the demerits - for offenses as minor as being late to class and as serious as conduct unbecoming a cadet during a band outing to New Orleans during Mardi Gras - were too much. She figured she would be suspended soon, anyway.

Even as she signed all the necessary papers to leave VMI on Tuesday, Jolin said, she found out she was the subject of an investigation by the school's Honor Court.

"It was just more stress waiting for me," she said.

Jolin said she doesn't know what the investigation could be about. The Honor Court investigates charges of lying, cheating and stealing at VMI. A guilty verdict by the super-secret court means automatic, immediate and permanent dismissal. But Jolin said the investigation had nothing to do with her leaving.

"I was in the process of getting myself boned out of school," Jolin said, using the VMI term for getting penalized with demerits. "It started to suck. Everyday I was in trouble for something else."

Jolin isn't the only rat in trouble. Superintendent Josiah Bunting is expected to rule soon on the fate of another female rat and a male rat caught having sexual relations in a barracks room. A cadet committee recommended a two-semester suspension for the couple. Jolin, a 5-foot-11-inch basketball and track star from Highland County, entered VMI with at least as much promise as the 29 women who accompanied her. Last summer, Bunting called her "exactly what VMI is looking for" in its first female cadets.

She overcame serious pain from back surgery during the summer to endure the physical rigors of the "ratline. The rest of VMI life, however, proved tougher.

Her first semester at VMI "just kicked my butt academically," she said. Her grade-point average was in the neighborhood of a 1.0 on a 4.0 scale, low even among rats, whose grades often suffer during the training period. Second semester got off to a lousy start when confusion over her schedule caused her to be late for classes and even miss one course for a few weeks because she didn't know she was enrolled in it, Jolin said.

Even with all her troubles, Jolin said she loved life at VMI. "I was eating it up," she said. Jolin, who plays clarinet, traveled with the school band last month on its annual Mardi Gras trip to march in a pair of parades. She wouldn't say what got her in trouble in New Orleans, but it resulted in a charge of conduct unbecoming a cadet, for which she was scheduled to go before the cadet executive committee for discipline, she said. Jolin was supposed to spend spring break in Florida, but car trouble kept her in Monterey, where she discussed her future with her mother, Dawn Marshall.

On Monday, when the other cadets returned to VMI, Jolin stayed home. She said she hopes to return to VMI. School spokesman Mike Strickler said it's possible for cadets who withdraw to return. Under some circumstances, investigations that begin before a cadet leaves the college may be reactivated if the cadet returns.

Jolin was probably just days away from "Breakout," the muddy ritual in which the rats end their ratline training by climbing up a nearly vertical red clay hill behind the barracks. The date is kept a secret. Her mother wanted her to postpone withdrawing at least until after Breakout. But Jolin isn't bothered by missing it. She knows she could have survived it.

"As long as I know I can make it," she said, "there's really nothing to prove."