Aw, man, that makes me sad. She say anything else about the CT rates?
HPL, I’ve seen you around the boards for awhile, and you sound intelligent. Go nukes if you want, but what are you going to do with that when you get out?
Go language, get that TS, SBI clearance, and you could end up having a lot of fantastic experiences. When you get out, you’ve still got that clearance and an intel background, and in this Homeland Security day and age, that could be really valuable.
I was stationed in Monterey three times (and came back here to live). I spend my whole Army career in the linguist field, always stationed in joint-service units. Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and usually foreign military as well. I’ve been all over the world. I’ve done some really cool shit.
Not everyone in the linguist field gets to do the really cool stuff, but if you work really hard, get good, there’s no limit to what you could end up doing.
Ok, worse case, you end up on a boat, in a dark room, with headphones on. OK, even worse case, you end up stationed in the Great Lakes, in a dark room, with headphones on. But best case, you do some awesome shit only a few people in the world can say they’ve done.
Are you dead set on the Navy? Considered the Air Force? Army?
Um, CTA, CTT, and CTR are merging with the new one, CTN. CTNs are supposed to to all the elite haxxoring for the government. :rolleyes:
And the SRB for my language is going up to 90k next year.
She says it’s pretty much open promotion all the way up the line, to to CTs being eligible to circumvent time in rate requirements. (Called it Early Promotion points, I think.) The fact that she made first class in her first tour underscores that point for me. I’ve now exhausted my reserve of useful information as a lowly Seaman.
As a follow up to my previous post and in light of some of the other posts since then, I would say that unless you have a burning desire to thermalize neutrons, stay out of the nuc rates. If seeing the world is your major criteria, some of the Navy aviation ratings are pretty good for this. My older brother was an AX (Aviation Anti Submarine Warfare Technician) and he spent the majority of his 6 years attached to a P-3 squadron in Hawaii. He flew lots of long missions, but got to see much more of the world than I did stationed on a destroyer. Also, he never set foot on a ship, which IMO, is a good deal for a sailor.
Well, there’s a bias because I’m a navy brat, but I’ve thought about the others. The air force would be my 2nd choice, then marines, and army last of all(partially because the one time I walked into an army recruiting office they gave me some phamplets and that was it, but also because I’d rather not get shot).
But I’m pretty far through the Navy process and I’ve wanted to go Navy for a long time.
I was an OS, Operations Specialist. I’ll put in a word for it.
The thing about OS is that it is kind of a catchall rating for a lot of tactical shipboard skills. Anything the ship does tactically, from simple navigation and station keeping to highly complex maneuvers like NGFS, amphibious operations, and control of helos and fighter aircraft - all involve OI division and OS’s to a high degree.
If this interests you, it should be looked into.
Drawbacks to the rate involve heavy time at sea, and relatively large quantities of collateral duties and scut work, especially as OI division has more warm bodies to throw at these tasks.
Man, forget CTI. It’s Navy SEALs that you really want 
I’m in fairly good shape, but not in that good of shape.
[Randall Graves]
Hmm…NAVY Seals.
[/Randall Graves]
I guess that just depends on your personal definition of being in “good shape”.
Though the training is rigorous, I don’t think it’s nearly as impossible as everybody claims, in other words it’s always second or third hand accounts of what it’s really like and hence something gets lost in translation. The indoc is easy enough. It’s just a matter of mind over body, though that is much harder in real life. I dreamed of becoming an elite-warrior for some spec-ops unit, but then after a little thought I realized that I just don’t have the patience that the job would require.
And IF one actually makes it through BUD/S and then becomes a seal, you’re pretty much guaranteed a trip to a shithole somewhere in the 3rd world… from which you might or might not return. A good quote comes to mind: “Bullets don’t discriminate” 
Go for intelligence, unless you have some reason to think you can’t pass a background check. My parents were in intelligence in the Navy, and it’s absolutely the way to go. On the ship you sit around shooting the shit in a room full of super-cool gadgets that only you and a handful of other intel folks have access to, doing not much work–fun and important work, when you actually do something–and getting pretty nice pay for it.
Plus, after you leave the Navy, defense contractors everywhere will pay you handsomely to stand in a room every once in a while and watch somebody build something, because of your security clearance.
BTW, with your ASVAB score you can take any job you want.
I absolutely agree with Frank. I’d go so far as to say, automatically disregard everything you hear that you don’t also see on paper, both in your recruiter’s office and at MEPS. Also, do the math for rank advancement, because they’ll try to sell you on a longer contract that will supposedly advance you faster, while the field you choose would advance you quicker anyway.
And Read. Every. Single. Word. before you sign ANYTHING. Verify every letter and number. If you can, bring a current or ex-servicemember with you every time you go to your recruiter’s office or MEPS. That’s what I did.
Here’s my boot camp advice, having spent almost three months in Air Force basic training.
When you go to boot camp, forget all about your ASVAB and your other scores. They don’t matter; you’ll be a doormat like everyone else. Keep your head down, don’t raise your hand (figuratively speaking) unless you know for certain you’re not volunteering for pigeon shit–it will take a couple weeks of traineedom, but you’ll develop a natural eye for that. Be as forgettable as possible the whole way through. Don’t show up in your Navy T-shirt etc; wear a completely inoffensive T-shirt and jeans.
Whatever you do, DO NOT, DO NOT, DO NOT and I mean DO NOT go to Medical unless you’re missing at least one leg. Let me repeat myself:
DO. NOT. GO. TO. MEDICAL. EVER. (Except the one or two times you go with the rest of the flight and they give you the peanut-butter shot, penicillin in the rear etc.)
Some O-2 or O-3 will be happy to write you a waiver that pulls you out of training, away from the trainees you’ve developed a rapport with, into medical hold where your soul and your will to live will be sucked out through your nose until you’re a dry, hollow shell of a man dreading the moment you wake up each morning, until they decide they’re tired of giving you medical attention and strong-arm you into going into another training flight (I don’t know what the Navy calls them), where you’ll probably have missed your A-school (or whatever) date and end up becoming a Master-at-Arms or a front-line sand-eater. Now, since you don’t want to go to Medical, that means you’re going to want strong shoulders that can handle infinite pushups–after you finish initial PRT someone’s going to say something wrong and you’ll all be on your face pushing Illinois into hell, and when you’re finally finished someone else is going to screw something else up and you’ll do it all over again, ad infinitum. That’s how I screwed myself over and ended up in Med Hold: I didn’t do my conditioning before going in. Make sure you are at least 197% sure that you will pass your initial PRT with flying colors before you go in. They might want to send you to a Get Fit flight if you fail initial PRT, too, and you’ll overexert yourself there and get sent to Medical Hold–that’s what happened to me and a lot of other Med Hold trainees.
Oh yeah, another thing. You will have A LOT more rights as a trainee than the TI’s (I think the Navy calls them DI’s) want you to think:
- Nobody can make you go to (or not go to) any particular religious service. If your DI tells you you’re not showing team spirit and you’re screwing up his/her training schedule–or makes you complete any task or extra work to earn the right to go/not go, etc.–report him or her.
- No DI can make any physical contact with you whatsoever–even so much as a finger on the brim of your hat–without first explicitly asking, “Can I touch you?”.
- Do everything [legal] that the DI’s or your student leaders tell you to do, exactly how you’re told to do it. You’d be surprised how far ahead of the pack this will put you. If you do that, and something gets screwed up, and an authority figure asks you why you did it the way you did it, tell them the truth: “Sir/Ma’am, Petty Officer X/Chief Y/My element leader told me to.” You won’t get in trouble.
- Use the feedback sheets that are all over the base. They’re there for a reason.
- You’ll probably be in a pretty constant state of quaking in your boots the first couple of days. Stay as cool as you can, find the most level-headed trainees in the flight and befriend them, then go to them and ask for help when you’re too freaked out by the scream treatment you just got to figure out how to do whatever it is you’re doing.
- Volunteer for KP. You’ll be glad you did. Seriously.
- Don’t let anyone with stripes know your name.
- Don’t ever, ever, ever, ever give an excuse or lie. DI’s are always trying to test your integrity by asking you what you were doing when they know you were (for example) writing letters. Tell the truth.
Boot camp is just about the easiest job in the world: you know exactly who you work for and exactly what’s expected of you. Do it with a smile. The DI’s will notice, and you’ll end up being the one scrubbing the least bird shit in the squadron. If you do it right, you’ll have a lot of fun and you’ll go to bed every night with a smile on your face.
We spy on everyone, including our allies, to keep them honest. Our allies spy on us, too. Declan, Israel actually is quite capable of domestic surveillance. When I was over there I was told that the IDF catches several would-be suicide bombers a month, before any bombs are strapped to chests.
Somebody mentioned the Air Force. Consider it; they’ll treat you better throughout your career because they’re a smaller force which spends more money and time on each individual member. You’re still going to be a doormat in every branch, though, because it’s not about you, it’s about the country that you’ve humbly submitted yourself to. Keep politics in mind at all times, especially in the Navy but really in any public sector job; one politically incorrect move early in your career can be immortalized in your FITREP files and put an unofficial ceiling on your promotions. That happened to my uncle, who took the cause of the wrong Chief when he was fresh out of the Academy. He did well eventually, but he screwed up his long-term chances for Captain from day one, and indeed never got there even though he was well-qualified.
People that would never have made it through A school ended up as push-button 2nd by the time they hit the fleet. And I saw that as the chief who had to get these people to perform the bare necessities to fulfill their duties. But that’s for another thread.
It basically comes down to what you want to do - sail around a lot and hitting the same ports over and over again (nuke) or stay in a room that looks like the room you stayed in at your last duty station all the time (CTI). Choose your rate and seal your fate - once you’ve passed the training for either field the only way out of it is by going into a commissioning program. Or by getting out of the Navy.
I have to agree with the earlier assessment that most nukes who get out before retiring don’t work in the commercial power field. But a lot of that has to do with the availability of jobs. Most of those positions are filled by retired nukes, and since sailors can retire as early as 38 years old, there are a lot of old guys at the different plants that have been there since before the Nimitz was commissioned.
But you have more skills than you know when you get out and you’re looking for a job. You have shown that you can be trained in just about anything. Depending on your time in and jobs held, you have management experience. Whatever it is that you learned to fix has civilian counterparts that don’t always deal with the commercial nuclear power industry - a pump is a pump, a motor is a motor, ELTs often go into the RadHealth field, and more and more companies these days need people who can troubleshoot electronic equipment down to the component level. And you’ve shown that for 6 years (at least) that you can show up for work everyday. You’d be surprised how far that can get you.
And to jrfranchi and Stranger - the credits you will receive depend on the degree you are shooting for. A friend of mine could have gotten 3/4 of the way towards an engineering degree with his EM nuke training, but since he was going for an econimics degree, got only 6 or 10 credits, for PE and some electives.