I have not yet gone to boot camp and i was wondering if anyone knows how hard it would be to get my B.S. with the 60 credit hours I have now plus the credits I can get from "A" school, power school and prototype. Any responses will be greatly appreciated
1) This depends on what college you choose to complete the degree. If you go with a traditional college, 30 to 45 units are required in residence, which means you will not be able to use currespondence courses other than those given by your selected college.
2) You can get better confirmation on this from someone else. I would expect that your credits equivalents from military training will be in the 30 to 36 credit range. If I can find my evaluations, I will update this with details (credits given by TESC and by a California State University).
3) Based on other posts in this thread, you should see that if this is your goal, you have added incentive to do your best in Nuclear Power School and prototype in order to get a staff instructor position, particularly at the New York site. These used to be assigned by your class/rate rank and evaluations.
Personally, I did not choose this route. I assumed that with approximately 100 units coming into the Navy, I would have no problem getting a degree. I declined a staff instructor position to get an assignment on a submarine. Career planning with your goals in mind is a must. You never know what is going to happen with your assignments. I elected consecutive sea tours and declined my STAR "C" school with the hope that I would be able to apply for a degree completion program or other assignment favorable to completing my education. While I saw on deployment, PRDs (projected rotation dates for duty assignments) had been changed Navywide and my detailer assigned me to recruiting duty. I found out about it when we returned from deployment and discovered my orders were to report to Recruiter training the following Monday. (I subsequently discovered that the ship had received my orders a month or more prior, and had neglected to inform me because they were trying to get the orders cancelled. There wasn't much time to get information because the rest of the crew was on standdown - a period of reduced activity that many ships are allowed after a deployment.) Because of this shore duty, my future commands refused to process my applications for any degree completion programs because they said I was ineligible due to the sea-shore rotation.
Enough of personal stories. The reason I brought it up is to illustrate that, no matter how much career planning you do, the needs of the Navy may supercede your plans, and so you must take advantage of any opportunity as it comes available to you. I firmly believe that I had the right to apply for a degree completion program, although I may have needed a waiver, but it was a command decision not to process my request. This is to illustrate that although some (probably most) commands will process special requests, there is no guarantee that a particular command will endorse your request (required for the request to leave the command).
Again, the above stories are only to caution you that there are scenarios, however unlikely they might seem, that might impede you from achieving your goal (and can be avoided by making good career decisions).
4) If, for whatever reason (needs of the Navy, etc.) you do not get that staff pickup prototype instructor assignment, there are many opportunities at sea. I will not discuss these because I do not have current information except to say that, unless you are stationed at a base with a good college representation (in other words, I am saying that in my time, there were few classes available on small bases), I would expect you will be taking correspondence course specific to your degree. The classes I have seen available on base on on ship are usually general education courses and, I assume, since you already have 60 credits, you have already fulfilled these.
5) Following a sea tour (I seem to remember that outstanding individuals could go to prototype after a three year sea tour rather than the usual five ... perhaps this is a STAR enlistment thing and someone else can answer this better than me) you can request prototype duty (preferably at New York), but I would recommend looking into the degree completion programs. Since you already have your 60 college credits, plus the military experience and nuke school credits, plus whatever credits you earned while at sea, you don't have to look at a program leading to a commission (not that it might not be your eventual goal, but I'm saying you have more options). There is (or used to be) a program allowing you to complete your associate's degree (i.e., a two year program that is compatible with a sea-shore rotation), but since you have already accumulated credits, it is well within reason that you could complete the B.S. in that time.
6) I would research various colleges and stick with one program. The easiest was to to this is with TESC (Thomas Edison State College in New Jersey) or the Regents of New York, which act as credit banks. I say this is easiest because generally they accept any college class. It is more tricky with traditional colleges because they are less likely to transfer credits. This is more a problem with your major classes than with general education requirements. For example, say I am an Electrical Engineering student at San Francisco State University. If I go down the road to San Jose State University (i.e., another school in the same system, just a different campus), their program is set up differently and no matter how much I insist that a certain combination of classes at one college is equivalent to another combination at the other college, the colleges will only transfer credit on a class by class basis. Then if I go up the road to UC Berkeley, they might accept certain classes not allowed by San Jose State U, but, on the other hand, accept certain other classes. Note that these schools are all state run within a 30 mile radius.
Another problem to watch for is that sometimes schools have their own unique graduation requirements. For example, you might go to college X thinking that you have fulfilled your general education requirements, only to find that of all schools in the state, the one you have chosen has an upper division general education sequence.
7) Disclaimer: Yes, I was a Navy recruiter and this is similar to the way I might have answered such a question. However, I am a 20 year vet with almost five years out, which is to say that this information must be regarded as dated and must be verified. In my time, you had to go to the yeoman's office and photocopy the information on a particular program, but I'm sure it is easier to search on the internet or on CD for the same information. These are general indications of what is available. I consider the anecdotal circumstances described to be out of the ordinary and not what would happen to the typical sailor, but are extremes of what could happen if you do not actively manage your career with specific goals. (No matter how much I knew about educational opportunites from being a recruiter, I could not get them to work for me. Hypocritical of me to descibe the opportunities? Maybe, but it was more management of my sea-shore rotation and unfortunate atypical events that took me out of the windows of opportunity rather than the opportunites not being there.)
8 ) Finally, I have not really answered your question by telling you how hard it will be. Most likely it will be a challenge. As mentioned in another post, you will have to decide on a balance of duty and fulfilling personal goals. For some people, the concept of duty is overriding. (Never, never make the assumption that being completely dedicated will allow the opportunity to achieve your goals "when the time comes". You don't get credit for being a good guy. The time will never come. If the degree is your goal, you must make that a priority and consciously set aside time for this.) That said, be aware that there is one time, I believe, your duty should override your goals and that is achieving your watchstation qualifications. The faster you qualify, the easier everyone's job is, and in the long run, the more time and consideration you'll get to fulfilling your own goals. Additionally, warfare qualifications are important, more from a command perspective, and I would consider them of equal or lesser weight than giving time to your degree goal. Many people would probably disagree with this statement. Personally, I'd make a distinction between SS quals and SW quals (of which I have both) with your SS quals being much more important from a practical and historical perspective, but that's another topic.
I've probably said too much, so I'll leave it at that, unless you have specific questions from me.