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O.K. I've read all 103 pages. In conclusion, I probably shouldn't enlist. As a 25 year old with a B.S. in Biology, options seem to be the following: Try for Navy OCS so I can do active duty. If that doesn't work, Navy reserves as I get my Master's in Microbiology over two years, then see if I can switch to active because we declared war against a continent (doesn't matter which one; sub-contients may apply). OR Apply for Army ROTC (because the Navy ROTC is undergrads only), and do that while I get my Master's. Then be in the Army. OR Do neither and keep applying for Navy OCS as I continue along the academic career path, hoping for a war before I age out. Q1> What alternatives am I leaving out? Q2> If I'm not going to make active duty Navy Officer, is it likely at all I'll make Navy Reserves Officer? Q3+> If I was going to go Reserves, what could I do to increase the liklihood of going Active Duty? Would turning down signing bonuses for the Reserves help? After x years, is it possible/likely to still apply and get into the active Navy? What is x?
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Sep 26, 2012 06:08
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 00:52 |
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Took the OAR today! Recruiters are suggesting that I did pretty well, which feels nice, but the scale of the scores makes pretty much anything feel meh I imagine. Advice about the OAR for anybody else about to take it: the mechanical comprehension caught me on some specifics (i.e. vocabulary and formulas) that I know in hindsight would have been easily prepared for (at least more-so than learning to read better or math better). At 30 seconds/question, this page will probably help more than a pile of test-prep books. piL fucked around with this message at 00:33 on Oct 25, 2012 |
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Oct 25, 2012 00:29
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In filling out my SF 86, is it important that I include part-time college jobs like desk clerk and contributing to the school paper? I have absolutely no idea who my supervisor was when I worked as a night desk clerk in a dorm.
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Oct 26, 2012 20:19
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Sir Lucius posted:They'll do most of the leg work, just pull up a phone number of some point of contact, HR, something like that so they have something to go on. Awesome, thanks guys. I'll just give them HR, because even if I gave them whoever was in charge (I don't know), all they'd be able to say is, "Let me check the records. Yeah, he worked here. No he wasn't fired."
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Oct 27, 2012 06:26
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How is the OAR judged? Is it the best score that you get, or the most recent? I got a score in the mid sixties, and think I could do better if I studied some mechanics since I wasn't as ready for that section as I thought I'd be. If I take it again, is there a chance I could shoot myself in the foot, or is it all the best-of, ACT/SAT style? Does it even matter if I got a score in the seventies instead of the sixties, or are they mostly concerned that I qualify and that's it?
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Nov 13, 2012 20:56
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Hi. I'm worried about something in a contract. I still have a lot of time and whatnot, but I just want to make sure that I'm refrencing the right documents when I go in. Is there an equivalent to this link for the Navy. If not, is there any reason I should expect what holds true in that document in regards to the Army is not true for the Navy? At this point, I'm still fairly convinced that my recruiter and the other recruiter I've been in contact with are honest in their endeavors and statements, and I'm not planning on bludgeoning them with anything legalesque; but if things don't go the way I'd like in a short while, I'd like to raise a ruckus, and I'd like to make sure that if I threaten to make the 10 meter walk next door and Go Army!, that that's actually a thing I can do.
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Feb 2, 2013 07:42
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Firstly, any facts I tell you in this post please look up because I don't know what I'm talking about, my sources are Google, and those suck. If you know now that you'd like to serve and college is something you'll be doing at some point anyway, then ROTC is clearly the right solution. The only reason to not would be that you think you wont want to join. As far as I'm aware, your service commitment doesn't kick in until you sign for a scholarship--you can participate in ROTC classes and training (at least for some length of time) without signing that scholarship and committing to serve. Furthermore, as I understand it, if you do sign that contract and you decide to opt out (while still in college, before graduating) it'll be an annoying and degrading process for sure, but at the end of it, you'll just be forced to pay back the money they gave you. This is not the best thing to do, because plenty of people would love to have that scholarship, If you waste that opportunity, you'd be wasting (some) taxpayer money and time. On the other hand, so does every dropout that got a Pell Grant, so while you'll probably be sternly talked to, you'd be on par with six-year seniors, dropouts and people with useless degrees they don't care about. If you wanted to be ultra-not-decide-anything, you could probably try to save up money and scholarships of equal value to what your ROTC scholarship pays, and you'd be set to drop whenever you wanted. But pretty much nobody has that kind of willpower, so I don't expect it. I regret not going the ROTC route. Dealing with the experience of not knowing whether or not OCS will happen and trying to plan around like ten contingencies between different service or academic options. If things don't turn out best-case-scenario at that point, you've probably stunted your back-up plan by a year. Oh, one more piece of information as you decide. The Army has a track for going to ROTC in two years, and when I was trying to figure out my commissioning options, it seemed like doing that through grad school could have been on the table. Navy ROTC has no two year option and states in its wording that you must be an undergraduate.
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Mar 10, 2013 21:30
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Thanks for the clarifications. I figured there was a contractual obligation at some point, but that the ROTC guys probably aren't standing there ready to sign you on day one. Manmower: Just an undergraduate degree, but I had included graduate school in my options. At the time, I figured there had to be some path that involved me getting my microbiology masters and then commissioning as a microbiologist. Near as I can tell, I was incorrect. Since I had decided to serve either before or after, I decided that getting a specific degree and then letting it sit on a shelf somewhere between four and twenty years in the potentiality that I didn't get picked up in a relevant military field was a sub-optimal approach. Happy ending: I got a call last week saying that I was picked for SWO and that I'll be going to OCS sometime in Summer/early-Autumn. I'm excited and terrified.
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Mar 10, 2013 21:55
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piL posted:I got a call last week saying that I was picked for SWO and that I'll be going to OCS sometime in Summer/early-Autumn. I'm excited and terrified. Posted Mar 10, 2013. While my recruiter has said I was accepted and that I have a job, and that's almost the last I've heard about it. In late April I was told that my enlisted contract* was gone and that I was simply waiting for an "officer contract". Well, now it's June, and people at work ask me at least twice a week if I know when I'll be gone yet. I keep having to say, "no clue". Is there any way to find anything out about what's going on other than pestering my Officer Recruiter? Am I an rear end in a top hat if I call him Monday and say, "Hey there Chief, just thought I'd say hi because it's June"? * I had decided to try and enlist while putting in an OCS package in case I didn't get the OCS package because I had absolutely zero concept at all what the likelihood of my getting a commission was and the idea that I'd probably be haunted by the idea of having missed my chance to serve for the rest of my life if I didn't have a back-up plan to OCS. Right now if I had to start over again, I feel like I'd hit every office in the strip mall and say, "I'll take whichever one of you guys can give me an actual OCS ship date."
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Jun 1, 2013 08:18
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Thanks Godholio! I've heard that I should have to do a PT test a month before I go, and that hasn't happened yet so it's been my reasoning that at this point I'm always going to be at least a month out. On further reflection, I don't really know enough to be certain that that actually has to happen.
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Jun 4, 2013 05:44
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 00:52 |
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not caring here posted:What your biological dad did considering you don't have any contact with him ain't gonna matter poo poo on a security clearance check. I know this sounds silly, but the fact that this is true is a really awesome part about this country. 
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Feb 27, 2014 07:09
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