Tips for an enlisted person.

[NavySTL]

BTW. forgot to add it in previous post. When I went through ET a school, we were allowed to pick our orders from a list of available billets based on our rank in the class. Don't know if it's still the same, but it's good motivation to do well in school.

As far as college on board ship, I took 24 semester hours in my last six month deployment. I found it rather easy to be honest. On my ship, ETs had nothin but time underway. The main jobs of an ET are maintaining and fixing equipment. Underway most equipment is operational, so you can't do a lot of maintenance. And if it aint broke, don't fix it.

 

[Beefalo]

Well thanks for the late reply NavySTL and everybody else. I leave for boot in a week. I like my job the only other job I might switch to if they let me in boot camp is AT since I always wanted to work on planes but that prob means no 3000 bonus for me. Ill do my best to follow everyones advice. Hopefully the economy will boom again and more petty officer quotas will need to be filled. See you in the fleet!

One last question. How long are you on land in your homeport while on a 4 or 5 year sea duty? Im considering buying myself a nice car as a reward for joining the Navy.

 

[Scamahmrd]

I was glancing through the posts and noticed you were looking at advancement rates for ET3 and FC3. It might have changed, but when I enlisted, all ETs and FCs got PO3 gauranteed (you just had to complete your time in rate and not go to mast.) Might want to ask your recruiter about it. Also, about the PO2 rates, don't let them scare you too much. Like someone else said, they can sway back and foreth grately. Also, I made PO2 when it was only 5%. It took me three tries. Without going into great detail, after the 2nd time I took the test I learned a valuable lesson: STUDY YOUR BUT OFF FOR THE EXAM (I missed it by 1.67 points with a 15 percentile in seamanship.) Anyway, just study hard, stay squared away and you will do fine.