I don't post here much, but I constantly lurk and keep seeing the same questions pop up around here. In seeing this, I thought it might be helpful to share my personal story about how I got where I am. I will start with some background information on myself. Within this information, you will see hints relating to some of the obstacles I had to overcome to get to this point.
I am 27 years old from a small town and grew up knowing, without a doubt, that I wanted to be a mechanic when I "grew up." I graduated high school in May, 2001 towards the top of my class having completed many advanced courses while maintaining a fairly respectable grade point average. My biggest problem with any life endeavor is that I almost always end up bored once I truly figure something out- in fact, it drives me crazy when I'm not learning something new. I grew up working in my family's HVAC business during the summers and sometimes on the weekends. I went to a community college after high school and studied automotive systems before landing a job at the local BMW dealership. Three, or so, years later I became bored with working on cars and came to despise the amount of money I was spending on my personal tool collection. I left the industry and lept into the world of warehousing and international freight forwarding (logistics). Within one year, I was the warehouse manager and life was "good." Unfortunately, even in a field dubbed the name "logistics", I realized that none of the problems presented to me took any real effort to solve. In the end, I once again became bored- then the economy hit and I lost that job. Fast forward a few months and I am sitting in a recruiter's office talking about my options.
Now that all of that is out of the way, lets talk about the process of enlisting and getting a "nuke" contract and what happens from that point forward.
When I started the process of enlisting, I was already 25 and about to turn 26. Oops, red flag number one since the cutoff for the program is 25. My recruiter- a surface EM(N) told me very clearly that he could probably get me in, but that the nuke job might be a struggle. He was right. I scored a 99 on the ASVAB, which by any other standard other than age would have qualified me immediately for any job i could ever dream of in the enlisted military. In my case, it wasn't good enough though and I still had to take the NAPT in order for my age waiver to be considered. I came to this website around that time, searching, as many others before me have, for information related to what might actually be on this dreaded test. After seeing what was on the test, I stopped worrying so much and decided "if I know it, great... if not, oh well." Bad choice on my part as I feel that I struggled a bit more on the test than I should have given how truly easy the test should have been to take. My advice would be to definitely study, or at least brush up on old topics. None the less, after being out of any formal education for six years or so, I scored a 69 out of 80 and was granted my waiver.
Now imagine living life in the "real world" as a civilian for almost 9 years and trying to enlist in the military without needing ANY other waivers. I don't really think it is possible. Life happens. Bad luck happens. Life goes on. What is paramount to receiving any of the waivers one might need for unfortunate circumstances (or stupid mistakes/actions) is how you handled these things and how forthright you are in telling what happened. Always be upfront and tell the truth, it's worth it on every level. I won't go into specifics on what other waivers i needed, but suffice to say with dedication, honesty, and a little work on my end, the paperwork went through.
Fast forward through 10 months of waiting in DEP and I left for Boot Camp. there is an excellent writeup on this site of a recent sailor's experience at RTC Great Lakes. I suggest anyone who wants to know what to expect should search for it and read through it. I will suffice to say that it was only as hard as the recruits made it on themselves.
I was selected to be an MM at Boot Camp which, fortunately, was my first choice given my background and life experience. I'm also not one to play WOW or the likes so I believe Navy made the right choice there!
MM School was much easier than I imagined it would be and I strolled through, finishing second in my class with a 3.56 overall GPA. The information is all given to you, it's just up to you to learn it. I think the number one piece of advice that I can offer is to manage your time responsibly! So many people here fail to recognize the importance of a good night's sleep with regards to success. I promise if you go to bed at a decent time- rather than playing video games or chatting your girlfriend, you will have more time on your hands to do those things. The only people that I personally ever saw struggle through School were the ones who had to stand up, or be woken up by the instructor, because they didn't get enough sleep the night before.
I am now on the celebrated portion of the pipeline called "t-track." In my honest opinion, this is the worst part of the pipeline/process to date. Many people absolutely LOVE the time off. I have found it intolerably boring and expensive. I can only hope that my wait to go to prototype after power school is short. T-track is filled with fun things like rotating shift work manning various watch stations or incessant boredom on cleaning crew. When not doing these mostly bogus jobs, you have lots of free time to spend all of your money. Yay. I guess there's a bitter spot inside me about it also since our class-up date was moved back two months from when we were told we would start. The original date would have had me starting power school classes on Monday. Such is life in the Navy though. Your schedule will always be adjusted as they see fit but I still hold fast to the notion that all of this hard work, almost 2 years to get to this point, is worth it in the end.
I know that I have written something more than a simple short narrative here, and something just shy of novel length
but what I wanted to put out there for anyone considering going in, staying in, or whatever- it's not easy to get here, it's not easy to stay here, and there are a lot of sacrifices involved but so far it's worth it. Don't ever give up if "nuke" is what you want.
If anyone has any questions about anything, please feel free to ask me here or in a PM.
