If you could start again, what would you major in?

There are times that I wonder why I didn't join sooner (I was 37 when I shipped out to Basic), but I still look at it like this: if I make my 20 years (and I certainly am going to try to), I'll still only be 57 when I retire. That's still before a lot of people are able to, so I'm just going to do my best to make it happen.

 

I would go into teaching. By now, I could be halfway to my 30, and I'm 38. As it is, I'm now in the process of switching into teaching, and won't have 30 years in until I'm 68.

 

Yep. Two of my classmates went to service academies - one to Annapolis, the other West Point. The Navy man works in the Pentagon; the Army dude is stationed overseas but is retiring at the end of the year.

Of course, if things hadn't gone the way they did I never would have met my wife and we wouldn't have our daughter. While it's fun to daydream about it, if you invented a time machine so I could actually go back and change things I wouldn't.

 

I'm living my "what the fuck moment" right now. By the time all is said and done, I will have lost more than I've gained from this thankless bitch called journalism.

 

Moments like that are why I joined.

 

I also had a moment where I interviewed for a job and the HR person said.

"And your degree is in journalism?"

"Yes, and I also have my Masters."

"Is that in journalism too?"

"Yes."

The face she made was what I would have expected if I had said, "And I passed my GED on the third try."

It's not the case at every company thankfully, but there are a lot of places that have ZERO respect for a journalism degree.

When I interviewed at my current job, they said. "So I'll bet deadlines are no problem for you?" and "I'll bet you have no problem talking to just about anybody." and I was just "Oh Thank God..."

 

Are you enlisted or are you in officer training?

I think it's awesome that you joined up. For some reason, I thought they didn't take people past 35, but I'm obviously wrong...

 

And even less for a sports writing background. A lot of people see it as just fun and games, like being a ski bum. Someone told a story here one time about applying for a hospital PR job where the interviewer was like, "Now, this isn't like sports writing. There's some real pressure here. Do you think you can handle that, considering your background?"

 

Still would be journalism. I yam what I yam. But I would have taken college more seriously.

 

I'm enlisted, but since I have a college degree already, I have hopes of going to school (on the Army's dime) and becoming a psychologist or psychiatrist. Yes, I'd owe them service for the education, but I think it'd be a good tradeoff.
When I first looked at joining, I thought about going to OCS (Officer Candidate School), but my credit stinks, so I wasn't going to be able to get a security clearance, so no OCS for me. However, I like my job, so I'm not complaining.
The cutoff (or it was when I joined) was that you could be 41, but not 42 when you went to Basic.It may have shifted downward with the Army's downsizing, but I'm not sure.

 

I enjoyed my uni's j-school program because it required classes in just about every discipline. As said above, I mainly wish I had an ed degree so if I wanted to teach, certification wouldn't be a PITA.

 

Truthfully, I don't think I've ever been asked about my journalism major. And in hiring people, I didn't care much about their major. I was more concerned with their writing/newspaper quality and experience, if they understood it was not a 9-5 job (nights and weekends were inevitable) and you could have a helluva a lot of fun at times.