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JacksLibido posted:Schandefrued AF picking up ascensions for flight rated positions without even a VFR licence boggles my mind out the back of my skull. You will regret joining the Air Force. Make sure you get that regret quantified as at least 30% disabled. Gut check yourself through your in-processing physical to make yourself out to be the picture of health. Then bitch about every little thing to anyone in the med group until their ears bleed. Don't bother trying to retire unless you are lucky and good enough to coast through a career. Retirement no longer has a sweet payoff. If you have a degree in medicine, biology, or chemistry you could try for a medical AFSC. That's slightly different acceptance and training process. Maybe faster, maybe slower depending on the specifics. It also requires a GRE score, the higher the better. Also, see if someone has pirated the BOT tests. Multiple choice. Pass the BOT test in OTS and you get your rank. You don't need to know how to march in time in a straight line, you don't need to stay up until 0330 [3:30 in the morning] studying, or any other nonsense, just pass 3 multiple choice political science tests with 30ish questions. Oh, and the physical training test. Google that, and train up for it. If you can't pass it, you'll get kicked out after a couple of years or so. With a severance package and honorable discharge.
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Jul 23, 2017 08:48
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All admin/ops stuff related to flying is handled by pilots for somewhat obvious reasons. I was kind of a nerd and tried to learn as much as I could from my DOs and Wikipedia but whenever a transient crew asked something that wasn't about an AR track i was familiar with or a basic question about the ICAOs my brain would shut down pretty fast
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Jul 23, 2017 14:29
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GiP is working hard to get another goon into the military. 
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Jul 23, 2017 15:08
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I feel like we're really just presenting him the path forward while highlighting why no sane person should walk it.
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Jul 23, 2017 17:23
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I mean it's better then being unemployed like i am right now. The way forward presented in this thread just seems a bit daunting espically with those rated careers.
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Jul 23, 2017 19:47
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To each they're own, I like the AF and have had a good time so far. It also helps that I make a solid $30k more than my college friends :p
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Jul 23, 2017 20:36
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^My first 3-4 years on active duty was the best time of my life. The next 3-4 were among the worst. YMMV.Fat_Cow posted:I mean it's better then being unemployed like i am right now. The way forward presented in this thread just seems a bit daunting espically with those rated careers. It is, but aside from building your application package, it's entirely out of your hands and on a hilariously inconvenient timeline, and nobody you have access to can actually answer your questions on what's going on and the only people who know wouldn't talk to you even if you could find them. It's actually surprisingly similar to how admin works in the active duty AF.
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Jul 23, 2017 20:53
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Fat_Cow posted:I mean it's better then being unemployed like i am right now. The way forward presented in this thread just seems a bit daunting espically with those rated careers. Think about the amount of work you have out towards your job search relative to what you'll have to do to get commissioned and put your head out of your rear end. Your grandfathers offhand comment does not necessitate this level of follow through, and while commissioning in the lamest branch of the military might solve your unemployment issues it will inevitably cause others. Why the gently caress did you even get a master's if you don't want to work in that field?
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Jul 23, 2017 21:59
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Kawasaki Nun posted:Think about the amount of work you have out towards your job search relative to what you'll have to do to get commissioned and put your head out of your rear end. Your grandfathers offhand comment does not necessitate this level of follow through, and while commissioning in the lamest branch of the military might solve your unemployment issues it will inevitably cause others. Sometimes it's hard to get a good job in your own field? I worked in mortgages for 2 years before I quit and joined the AF, I had a business degree and loving hated business. I don't know about the OP but I know plenty of people who couldn't find jobs with a bachelors so went straight into getting a masters, then found themselves in that wonderful position of being "over qualified" with no work experience. As much as you guys may hate the military now, there's no denying that it pays well and it gives you good options when your commitment is up.
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Jul 23, 2017 22:05
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If you've got a decent education that you have a chance at using in the AF, I don't see anything particularly bad about doing a 4-year run as an officer. You can get out with that same degree, GI Bill for a grad degree, hopefully some kind of semi-relevant work experience, MURICA cred, and probably a security clearance. And yeah, the pay is pretty good by the end.
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Jul 23, 2017 22:12
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Godholio posted:If you've got a decent education that you have a chance at using in the AF, I don't see anything particularly bad about doing a 4-year run as an officer. You can get out with that same degree, GI Bill for a grad degree, hopefully some kind of semi-relevant work experience, MURICA cred, and probably a security clearance. And yeah, the pay is pretty good by the end. The point I'm making is this dude is already looking at A) not easy B) Likely not his field and C) joining the military so these comparisons don't seem that apt. He's like a whore being gradually convinced to do a gangbang because that's all the AF will film, and you monsters are the ones turning him out
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Jul 23, 2017 23:30
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Yeah because commissioning in the USAF is like getting gang banged.
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Jul 23, 2017 23:33
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Yeah, it's not like he's going to the Academy.
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Jul 23, 2017 23:37
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Or that he's a chick. Your not a chick right? Because the Air Force is an all you can rape buffet apparently.
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Jul 23, 2017 23:52
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No, not a female. My field just seems amazingly hard to find work in, or i am just grossly incompitent. Six years of public sector expierence through College + Grad school + and internship and still nothing. Still family/friends helping me the best they can.
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Jul 24, 2017 01:18
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The USAF beats the ever living gently caress out of unemployment. It also beats the poo poo out of all the other branches when it comes to quality of life. I gotta say I encourage you to seek a commission.
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Jul 24, 2017 01:30
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I sit in an office, where my day consists of a mix between technical work,  supervising my NCOs and their airmen, attending meetings, and watching videos on youtube. I could make better money on the outside, but goddamn my job is so easy. Even with poo poo additional duties like COMSEC and CA/CRL (for the unfamiliar: paperwork and inventory intensive bookkeeping, basically). It wasn't always like this. As a young airman, I dug trenches, pulled cable, set up mobile radio networks, drove convoys, got shot at, picked up thousands of cigarette butts, and mopped up literal rivers of human poo poo when a sewage main broke in the dorms. Somehow, despite all that, I still earned a better paycheck than many of my friends who went to college instead of enlisting as teenagers.If you commission as a non-rated officer, you'll have a far better paycheck and launch right into the managerial office work and never ever live in dorms, or get turbofucked with the enlisted scum because someone in another flight got a DWI, or perform any sort of manual labor. Some bases suck, and some of the people you'd work with will be losers, but you'll be treated like an adult from day one, and it's sure as poo poo better than moving back into mom's basement with an advanced degree. There are worse ways to make a buck.
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Jul 24, 2017 02:16
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It's well hidden, but junior officers are generally not treated as adults from day one. Maybe treated as an 8 year old vs a 5 year old. Aside from barracks nonsense, they get most of the same bs just behind closed doors.
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Jul 24, 2017 02:33
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Fat_Cow posted:Awesome post again. The reason I would shy away from pilot is mostly due stress/anxiety on flying a large aircraft. I mean I would be able to fly (got PRK surgery), but I dont think my personality meshes well with that sorta job. Mission planning does sound interesting since planning sorta meshes with my Masters (city Planning v mission planning), which I assume have goals, objectives, etc. Do these rated jobs have high AFOQT score requirements or is it just apart of the entire application package? I forgot to mention that when you go for your interview with a FGO (if they still do that) you'll probably be asked about being a pilot, either why you want to be one or why don't you want to be one. You'll want to avoid saying anything about not liking stress etc. it'll probably not end well.
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Jul 24, 2017 03:54
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IIRC my interview was a captain, tanker pilot. We talked about guns mostly, since I was wearing my guard uniform.
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Jul 24, 2017 04:57
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Arc Light posted:I sit in an office, where my day consists of a mix between technical work, Maybe it's just a pilot thing but every officer I knew had an epic hazing story from reporting to their squadron. Well except the wing king. He had a heart warming story of having no duties at all as a butterbar outside of scheduled training flights so he just breathed down the schedulers neck every day to get more hours
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Jul 24, 2017 11:46
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Larry Parrish posted:Maybe it's just a pilot thing but every officer I knew had an epic hazing story from reporting to their squadron. Well except the wing king. He had a heart warming story of having no duties at all as a butterbar outside of scheduled training flights so he just breathed down the schedulers neck every day to get more hours Officer epic hazing is presumably done behind closed doors. Enlisted hazing is/was open. And back in the not-too-recent past, it was very much still a thing for new airmen. I've got fond memories of being chased down by the rest of the shop, tackled, physically subdued with my wrists and ankles duct taped up, and then trying desperately to free myself before the older airmen/NCOs could drag me to the GOV and deposit me someplace embarassing. One of the other guys couldn't get free. He got ditched in front of security forces HQ, bound and gagged. Ah, to be an A1C again. EDIT: we were game for it. The airmen who weren't cool with roughhousing didn't get the FNG treatment like the rest of us, but I assume they were secretly looked down on.
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Jul 24, 2017 18:43
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Fat_Cow posted:No, not a female. My field just seems amazingly hard to find work in, or i am just grossly incompitent. Six years of public sector expierence through College + Grad school + and internship and still nothing. Still family/friends helping me the best they can. wait you did an internship with a masters and didn't get an offer? Yeah maybe a commission isnt the worst idea
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Jul 25, 2017 01:38
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Arc Light posted:Enlisted hazing is/was open. Back in the 00s at Luke we'd get people when they Pcsed out. So the week before you left you tried to not show up at the building or be ninja about it, but for one reason or another everyone always got spotted then hog tied / taped up to a palm tree. Then they would have all the condiments from the shop fridge dumped on them, and once you were fully disgusting, someone uninvolved would cut you lose and you had a chance to get everyone back by rubbing your nastiness all over them. You knew that the person was disliked if this didn't happen to them when they PCSed.
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Jul 25, 2017 09:18
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We usually just dumped a few gallons of water on people as they departed their fini-flight. Sometimes cheap champagne.
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Jul 25, 2017 16:10
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Godholio posted:We usually just dumped a few gallons of water on people as they departed their fini-flight. Sometimes cheap champagne. This. The extent of our "new guy hazing" is saying "you're new so nobody cares what you think" everytime an Lt has an idea... unless the idea is good then we say "good idea".
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Jul 25, 2017 20:42
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We just go to the bar at noon on a weekday and drink with the guy departing, why the gently caress would you waste time ball torturing him or any of that stupid poo poo
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Jul 25, 2017 20:46
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We did wrap one guy in about half a roll of duct tape during his first callsign night with the squadron, but that was because he'd been talking poo poo prior to reporting from the training pipeline. He reformed. 
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Jul 26, 2017 01:20
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Our hazing usually consisted of telling people their upcoming deployment date the day they reported in to the squadron. My personal touch was to inform them that most of what they had been told in the training pipeline was a lie and that they would be taken for granted but still expected to perform.
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Jul 26, 2017 09:28
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Really, officer hazing is much more cerebral. Oh what fun we would have. Our deployed squadron commander made a man who was entrusted to command warplanes of the United States request a written waiver to policy so that the man could be in the same room as his wife with the door closed. On their anniversary. It was the most humiliating thing I have seen done to a husband since I watched Braveheart. Or that time we scheduled an extremely well performing Captain to deploy during the two weeks he had requested off for his wedding and honeymoon. He had already paid for tickets and hotel rooms on the assumption that no reasonable person would gently caress with his wedding just to avoid a deployment shortfall. You should have seen his face.
Dead Reckoning fucked around with this message at 09:38 on Jul 26, 2017 |
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Jul 26, 2017 09:35
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Weren't you an MC-130 nav?
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Jul 26, 2017 09:42
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I ask because AFSOC was traditionally more chill than that. Waaaay more chill than that. But I guess there were lovely corners.. U-28 life sucked dog dick hard, didn't think it was like that for the MC-130's, that surprises me.
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Jul 26, 2017 09:46
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They got me good one time: the Group security office didn't process my security clearance renewal, and when I asked why, they told me that they had lost my SF-86 and associated paperwork. Lost it! As though it was a pair of socks! And that it was my fault, because I had not been calling them regularly to make sure they were doing their job! My squadron leadership agreed that I was making them look bad by not being able to deploy, so they put me on a poo poo deployment with the worst Aircraft Commander in the squadron. Great prank, bro! A few years later, I got a letter saying that OPM had lost my SF-86 *again*, and they didn't know who had it, but the joke was stale by that point. LtCol J. Krusinski posted:Weren't you an MC-130 nav? No. I would have let my entire chain of command up to the CSAF piss in my mouth if it meant that they would have reassigned me to MC-130s or AC-130s. Dead Reckoning fucked around with this message at 09:49 on Jul 26, 2017 |
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Jul 26, 2017 09:46
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Dead Reckoning posted:No. I would have let my entire chain of command up to the CSAF piss in my mouth if it meant that they would have reassigned me to MC-130s or AC-130s. Yeah that just didn't sound like AFSOC. What did you fly around in?
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Jul 26, 2017 10:07
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Not saying much, but AFSOC is probably the best MAJCOM to fall under even as a lowly enlisted comm dude. Maintenance might disagree but it sucks everywhere for them I would assume.
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Jul 26, 2017 11:00
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Dead Reckoning posted:Our hazing usually consisted of telling people their upcoming deployment date the day they reported in to the squadron. My personal touch was to inform them that most of what they had been told in the training pipeline was a lie and that they would be taken for granted but still expected to perform. It's not hazing if it's accurate. Edit: Hell, we had to rush CMR paperwork on people coming out of the pipeline so they could deploy and fill a crew.
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Jul 26, 2017 14:28
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Godholio posted:It's not hazing if it's accurate.  E: for non AF observers. Those were all 100% normal, including the "need a waiver to be alone with a woman, aka the Threshold Rule" story. Arc Light fucked around with this message at 14:36 on Jul 26, 2017 |
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Jul 26, 2017 14:34
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It's 6:30 and I have zero coffee. 
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Jul 26, 2017 14:35
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Being in the military is for idiots and still wanting to join after reading all of this is means you're a perfect fit, hth
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Jul 26, 2017 16:19
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Half of the docs I know who were assigned to AFSOC had miserable experiences. Like having their leave cancelled to come sweep hangar floors on the weekend type stuff on top of ridiculous deploymemt tempos I wonder why those guys are in private practice now.... 
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Jul 27, 2017 06:45
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