Moving up p1 - Military Career Advancement - Military Times Edge

A funny thing happened on the way to a college degree for Airman 1st Class Christine Haight.

Fresh out of tech school, Haight visited the education office at her first duty station, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, to register for some off-duty courses. She walked out with a new plan.

“I went in to sign up for college classes, and I left carrying a bunch of papers on applying to the academy,” she said.

A year and a half later, the dental assistant is packing her things for Colorado Springs. If all goes according to plan, she’ll PCS to her next duty station in four years as 2nd Lt. Christine Haight.

Haight is one of 60 people accepted this year into the Leaders Encouraging Airmen Development, or LEAD, program, which sends hard-charging young airmen to the Air Force Academy. It’s just one of more than a dozen paths enlisted service members can take to a commission, each with its own route, rules and requirements.

Some programs send troops to ROTC or Officer Candidate School; others, like LEAD, bring them to the service academies. Under some commissioning programs, troops receive active-duty pay or a scholarship; under others, they’re on their own. Some require troops to have a college degree or college credit, study certain subjects or be a certain rank.

The specifics of the application process vary as much as the eligibility requirements, but all commissioning programs do have at least one thing in common: a daunting checklist of evaluations, medical records, recommendations, test scores and transcripts.

It’s not just the number of things you have to do; it’s figuring out what to do when so you keep a slew of connected elements moving forward efficiently, said Capt. Scott Smith, a full-time Green-to-Gold adviser at Fort Drum, N.Y. For example, Green-to-Gold applicants have to be accepted by three different parties: by the college, by the commander of the ROTC unit at the college (called the professor of military science) and by the Army. In juggling all those pieces, “soldiers don’t necessarily start with the things that take the most time,” Smith said.

The best person to guide you through the maze of your specific application is probably the career counselor at your installation, said 2nd Lt. Amanda Castravet, who attended the academy through the LEAD program and now works with LEAD applicants in the admissions office. An education services officer might be able to help, too.

But whatever program you apply to, you can’t go wrong by following this advice.

Start yesterday

Don’t procrastinate — and not just because many commissioning programs have a maximum age. The application is a complicated process and there might be snags. Haight had to be tested and re-tested four or five times in order to pass her Department of Defense Medical Examination Review Board. “It felt never-ending,” Haight said. “[The DoDMERB] was much more extensive than I imagined.”

Furthermore, parts of the application depend on people who will not have your sense of urgency. For example, college offices work on a different timeline than the military selection board, Smith said. To them, a potential Green-to-Gold candidate is just another student, and they’ll process his or her paperwork at the same pace as every other student.

Get your supervisor involved

You will need your chain of command’s support, and your supervisor is the best place to start. He or she “can sometimes get things done quicker than you can,” said Castravet, such as arranging the letters of recommendation or nomination review board you will probably need. It’s also important to “let them know what the process is like and what’s expected of you, so they know what you’re doing and realize how much work it really is,” she added.

Be ambitious, but not entitled

To be successful, commission-hopefuls need to have a fire in their belly. “If you take a class, get an A. If you take a PT test, max it. If you go to a school, be the honor grad,” Smith advises soldiers. If you’re working on college classes already, math and science courses will carry more weight than humanities.

Don’t become trapped in the comfort zone of the familiar, and don’t make the mistake of self-selecting, Smith and Castravet urged. But don’t act as if you’re entitled to a slot, either. Green-to-Gold applicants sometimes assume they qualify for a spot in an ROTC unit automatically, Smith said. “Soldiers think: ‘Of course, [the professor of military science] wants me. I’m a soldier.’”

Try to lose that attitude now because you will need humility if you are accepted to a commissioning program, Castravet said. You will have more military experience than many of your peers, but you also need to be open to what you can learn. She admits that letting go of her expectations was one of the biggest challenges of going to the Air Force Academy as a prior-enlisted airman.

Haight said she is already reconciled to the prospect of taking orders from younger cadets with less Air Force experience.

“The thing that I realized is they’ve been through the first year of the academy. ... I may be prior enlisted, but I haven’t gone through what they’ve gone through.”

Not yet, perhaps — but soon. Haight reported to basic cadet training June 23.