female nukes

[stephpatton]

where can female nukes expect to be stationed after school..hopefully east coast.

[HydroDave63]

wherever a CVN can be found

[stephpatton]

wherever a CVN can be found

Ok, i understand this much, and correct me if I'm wrong.

After power school, you will be stationed to a CVN.  Not a base.  Although your family lives on base lets say charleston, you are stationed on an aircraft carrier.

You report to work daily and stand watches on the aircraft carrier that is in port at charleston.  You get on the ship at a certain time, you get off the ship at a certain time, you go home.  Unless for training where you may be gone 2 weeks at a time. 

Deployment is when you are given orders to remain on the ship for an extended period of time at sea to do work needed by you for the purpose of the navy.  This happens every 18 months, for a period around but not limited to 6 months. 

shore duty is when you are needed at the naval base, say for education and instruction, or if your rate is primarily needed on shore...

sea duty is when you are needed at sea, say repairing, running, and supervising things on a ship. 

nukes, unless instructors or recruiters, will be primarily stationed to a sub or CVN.  BEcause, duh, your job is to supply power to them.

So, I will be stationed to a CVN because I'm female.  The CVN will be in port at my home base where my family is, unless needing to deploy or go on a training mission. 

[HydroDave63]

yes! However....

1. Deployments can come honestly at ANY time, not constrained to every 18 months. They can last from 5 to 10 months... Ike was recently out for 10 months back in '07.

2. Duty days keep you onboard, even if nothing truly useful going on

3. Post-deployment maintenance and SRAs (if that's what they are still called) can be labor-intensive for the crew.

4. Pre-deployment workups can go longer than 2 weeks, such as failing REFTRA, INSURV or ORSE at sea, etc.

[Gamecock]

You report to work daily and stand watches on the aircraft carrier that is in port at charleston.  You get on the ship at a certain time, you get off the ship at a certain time, you go home. 

There are no CVNs in Charleston.

CVNs are in Norfolk, San Diego, Bremerton, and now Japan.  Someday, there might be one in Mayport, FL.  I'd bet if you put CVN  East Coast on you dream sheet, you'll get it.

[HockeyFan]

I'll add that duty days are 24 hours on the ship, every 4-8 days for me, and it was mostly 6 day rotations, and your family can visit you for dinner on the mess decks if you are not on watch.  If I had the 8-2 watch (both AM and PM), my wife always visited me for dinner.  On Monday through Friday you will work a normal workday, but I mostly gave early liberty after lunch if all the maintenance was done with the thought that the duty section could handle anything that came up.

Your sea shore rotation may be 5 years of sea command and 3 years of shore duty.  Tender duty counted as shore duty, and some went from ship to ship.  I don't know why.  For a 6 year commitment, expect your entire time to be on a ship after training.

During sea duty, you may be out to sea for 9 months out of the year or you may be in the shipyard for 6 months or longer or you may be in and out two weeks to two months.  In four years of sea duty, you will probably do a few deployments unless your ship is in the shipyard for refuel or commissioning.  There is generally more work in the shipyard than out to sea, but you see your family more.

Dave

[sovbob]

Ok, i understand this much, and correct me if I'm wrong.

After power school, you will be stationed to a CVN.

Steph,
Your statements are pretty accurate.  One slight nitpick.  Nuclear Power School (NPS) is the 2nd stage of the 3-stage training pipeline for nukes.  After NPS, you will report to a nuclear prototype.  There's currently two prototypes that the navy operates.  One is in South Carolina, just down the road from Naval Nuclear Power Training Command (NNPTC), where A-school and NPS are located.  The other prototype is located in upstate New York, near Saratoga Springs.

At prototype, you are taught using hands-on training how to operate a real reactor plant.  The plants in Charleston are essentially old submarines that have been bolted to the pier.  The plants in NY are...well they're just buildings.

Prototype lasts 6 months, but if you're motivated, smart, and/or make friends with the staff you can qualify ahead of schedule.  That's an enviable place to be.  Your quality of life will skyrocket for the remainder of prototype once you qualify.

I hate to say it, but the staff at prototype will often exhibit bias towards students.  If you piss off the staff, you will have a much harder time qualifying than the next guy.  By the same token, attractive females never seemed to have any trouble getting signatures.  Based on your avatar, Steph, you would be considered "Extremely Attractive" by navy standards.

[stephpatton]

yes!

Thank God for this website.  You know when you are trying to learn something and you get so dang tired that all the text starts looking like a gigantic megaword and you've got tons of info swirling around in your head...then the light clicks on...and bam, you understand! you feel like a huge weight has been lifted off your brain...yah, that's what this website does.  It prepares and teaches you what no recruiter or pamphlet can.  i think i'm going to go play hopscotch now, i'm so ecstatic.  I knew all those years of being a nerd would pay off somehow.  I just may be helping supply nuclear power one day...after they finish hating me for being new...believe me, I've run the gauntlet in the medical field...nurses and dialysis techs eat their young...its part of the process.  if someone can't hack it, we want them the hell out of our sight and moving on to a different job.  I'm sure the same holds true in the nuke program.  mediocracy is not acceptible when you are dealing with human lives.

[itsaparent]

mediocracy is not acceptible when you are dealing with human lives.

As an ex nurse I can vouch for the loathing of mediocrity in patient care.
It would be great if mediocracy (management  provided by mediocre people)were unacceptable.    Don't get these guys and gals started on mediocracy! 

[Preciousblue1965]

I hate to say it, but the staff at prototype will often exhibit bias towards students.  If you piss off the staff, you will have a much harder time qualifying than the next guy.  By the same token, attractive females never seemed to have any trouble getting signatures.  Based on your avatar, Steph, you would be considered "Extremely Attractive" by navy standards.

While there is some truth to what he says, don't bet on it being that way.  There are some staff members that will give females an even more difficult time if they ever see any kind of "female favortism" or if they think the said female is trying to "skate by on her looks" 

If you ever really want to see how bad it can get, just tell a staff member what you do and do not have to know for a checkout.  We had a kid make that mistake one time.  It wasn't pretty.

[stephpatton]

As an ex nurse I can vouch for the loathing of mediocrity in patient care.
It would be great if mediocracy (management  provided by mediocre people)were unacceptable.    Don't get these guys and gals started on mediocracy! 

haha, tell me about it, i think if some of these guys and gals could rid the world of mediocre drones, they would have no prob.  I think its a military thing, one of my college boyfriends who was an army veteran had no qualms to look someone right in the eye and say "shut up because your dumb and you take up entirely too much space on this earth."

[sovbob]

Preciousblue1965 makes a good point, one that will be repeated several times along your path of nuclear learning.  That is, just when you think you know it all, you find out that you really don't know anything at all.

The navy's nuclear training program is designed to cram an unbelievable amount of knowledge into your head in a very short amount of time.  Even so, it only teaches the absolute minimum you need.

When I went through Nuclear Power school, I got decent grade (3.40 GPA), so  felt well-prepared for prototype.  I figured it was going to be a walk in the park.  After all, they had taught me everything I needed in school and now I just needed to apply that knowledge.

...or so I thought.

As a student in prototype, you don't know a damn thing.  You might think you know a thing or two, but as soon as they start throwing questions at you, you'll realize just how limited your knowledge really is.  Cocky students who think they know better than the staff will quickly get crushed.

Think about it from the perspective of the staff member.  After spending 5 miserable years out on a ship, they come to prototype as an instructor.  While the schedule is more predictable, it's still operation of a naval nuclear power plant.  Furthermore, the evil Naval Reactors is constantly breathing down their neck.  On top of that, there is an endless stream of clueless students begging them to give a checkout on the XYZ Umpty-fratz System.  After 2 hours of pulling teeth and sending the kid away with a stack of lookups, some other kid walks up and says "I know everything about the Umpty-fratz system.  In fact, I know more about the Umpty-fratz system than you do, even though you've been doing this job for 7 years and I just got out of Nuclear Power School last month."

How would you respond?

Note:  The Umpty-fratz system does not really exist, I just use it as an example.