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star trek - Did Chief O'Brien go to Starfleet Academy?


I had been under the impression that enlistees like Chief O'Brien did not attend Starfleet Academy, but I was just watching DS9 episode "Trials and Tribble-ations," and Dr. Bashir made the following comment:



Come on, Chief, surely you took elementary temporal mechanics at the Academy?



Being close friends by this point in the series, Bashir would certainly know whether or not O'Brien went to Starfleet Academy. So it seems to me, this leaves one of the following options:


A. Enlistees go to the Academy as well, but for whatever reason don't get to be officers. Maybe poor grades, or an abbreviated courseload for enlistees?


B. Chief O'Brien failed out of the Academy and decided to enlist instead.



C. There's some other Academy to which Bashir is referring.


D. This is a scriptwriting error.


D seems like an unacceptable answer because, even if this were the case, the mistake should be rectified by working it into the lore. C would make sense but if so, you would think it would be mentioned at some other point in the history of Star Trek. That leaves A and B, which both seem equally plausible to me. Or is there another option that I'm overlooking?



Answer



Yes and No. From memory alpha, referencing the Trials and Tribble-ations mentioned in the question:



Julian Bashir once remarked that O'Brien had attended Starfleet Academy in "Trials and Tribble-ations", which is a training school for commissioned officers and not noncoms. Ronald D. Moore remarked, "This is a mistake, plain and simple. If you want to rationalize it, I suppose we could say that the enlisted training program also takes place at the Academy." (AOL chat, 1998)



So there are in universe statements that O'Brien attended Starfleet Academy, but this appears to be a mistake. Also, in the DS9 episode "Shadowplay" O'Brien says that at age 17 he declined admission to the Aldeberan Music Academy and enrolled in Starfleet. This would suggest that he went straight into Starfleet without attending the academy. (Of course, it does not preclude that he might have returned to the academy after having served some time in Starfleet.)


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