you live around norfolk? all this time i thought you were stranded in the hills like me.

Portsmouth, but it's all the same area, so same thing really. I'm fifteen minutes from downtown Norfolk.

This is true.

When I joined in 08, the Army was still heavily reliant on Soldier-run equipment. We got the stuff, we hooked it up, we configured it.

Nowadays, it has drifted to a civilian run overlordship.

It's a lot more difficult nowadays to find yourself in a spot in which you'll be working as a systems administrator. Then again, I'm not a 25B but I've worked with many. They just know a little bit more, but don't get the chance to expand on that knowledge depending on where they are in the world.

This doesn't mean that you will not get experience if you join the military, it just means you won't get as in depth into it nowadays like you would have years ago.

The military is still a great option, but it will be highly dependent on your attitude and your willingness to learn things outside of what the military crams down your throat.

The good thing about the army for me, is it got me interested in aspects of I.T. and telecommunications that I never knew about before.

The army paid for my Security Plus cert, gave me a clearance, and if and when I decide to get out, I can get paid to go to college.

I don't think Batlord should join the army. I bet he's the kind of guy who would fuck a person in the ass and not even have the goddamn common courtesy to give him a reach-around.

This is also a huge problem in our military.

To much butt-f*ckin, not enough reacharounds.

It's a sad life I live.

Well, internships will be good to get you in the door at an entry-level position. From that position, you can then work your way up. Simply being in that position for long enough and demonstrating ability will be both the experience and the confidence for you to be promoted. But don't try and jump ship to a higher position in another company until you've got a couple solid years in you with enough hands on.

Yea, an associates of applied science is good for getting the basics in terms of the knowledge at a bird's-eye view, and it's better than nothing when going into an entry-level position. It probably won't be enough to get you from where you're at right now, directly into a sysadmin position, but you'll have the background to work up to it.

Well... what kind of military jobs are you talking about? Jobs as a civilian contractor? If that's the case, yea, you're not going in entry-level. You'd actually be in a contractor agency. But if you're referring to looking up IT jobs in job websites and seeing things about the military, well... those are just advertisements to join the military and get a particular MOS. If you wanted to go the Sysadmin route in the military, you don't need anything except to be able to score high enough on your ASVAB. After that, they'll teach you what you need to know to do your job, and you'll do it for 6 years (Army, anyway) wherever they want you to do it, including deployments, etc. That's just joining the military.

I assumed I wouldn't just be able to jump into a 70K job after two years of school, so I'm prepared for eating **** for a while. I'll be 29 as of Saturday, so I guess it's time to pick a direction and just start walking before I can talk myself out of it.

I was just checking out local job websites to get a feel for the market around here, and they weren't just military jobs. Like I said, Hampton Roads' economy is based almost entirely around the military. Without it we'd pretty much be a rinky dink longshoreman's town nobody'd ever heard of.

So anything not ****ty like fast food is most likely going to be involved somehow or another with the military, whether by actually joining the navy, working the shipyards, or whatever. Likewise, it looks the same for IT jobs.

By all means, it's a worthy road to travel if you enjoy doing the work, no matter what it takes to get there.

Just make sure it's something you really want to do. A lot of times, you don't really figure that out for a while because you never know what it really involves, but if you're keen on solving problems and finding solutions, it's a good field to be in. Just beware... if you do your job too well and are too proactive, you can end up bored as f*ck and just surfing the internet all day while enjoying the smell of your own farts.

1.) If I wait to figure out what I most want to do, I'll never do anything -- like I've been doing since flunking out of high school -- as what I really want to do involves doing nothing. I'm serious when I say that my dream is to live on a tropical island where I can run my own off-the-grid ex-pat beach bar and be Jimmy Buffett without the guitar. Whether or not I have time to figure out what I want to do, it's beyond past time to at least pick a general direction.

2.) I'm not necessarily a computer tech head, or even the greatest problem solver (though that conclusion is mostly derived from my experience as a burger flipper who sucks at making twelve sandwiches at once), but a field involving computers is still the only thing I can see myself enjoying to any extent. Even if being a sysadmin isn't the right fit for me, the educational and experience path it would lead me down would probably at least point me in a direction that would suit me.

P.S. If you know IT-type jobs which suit a socially awkward introvert, then I'm all ears.

3.) I need to surround myself with fellow nerds. I can't take any more of this spending my working hours with low class anti-intellectuals. Nothing wrong with those people in general, and I've enjoyed the working comradeship I've developed with some of them in the past, but we're just not the same people and have nothing to talk about past smoking weed and bitching about our ****ty jobs. I don't think believing in evolution is that high of an expectation for a coworker.

honestly i dunno if sysadmin is even what i was studying for... here the job ads i see seem to call it network administrator. basically i was studying maintaining and troubleshooting company networks.. which for the most part translated to working with windows servers and clients and cisco networking equipment and protocols.

mostly it's learning arbitrary details about specific software + learning how to apply that knowledge to general troubleshooting. which i would guess you could do tbh batlord.. it just comes down to whether you are disciplined enough to force yourself to get it down.

i was originally interested more in computer science but they told me in terms of getting a job i was better off learning this. for computer science you really want a bachelors and possibly even more. so out of cheapness/impatience/low expectations, i settled. actually, truth be told, even computer science is a compromise for me... i prefer the biological sciences.. i just don't know how to pragmatically make that a career at this point without going into the medical industry, which doesn't interest me at all. mostly cause i just dislike being around sick people. but i can usually at least find some interest in anything that involves logic and science and engineering... assuming that i can grasp it. so i thought computers seemed like a safe choice in this era... cliche as it may be.

but even those basic IT jobs are mostly in cities that are too far from me atm. there is one place sorta nearby hiring people with software engineering skills, so i might just go that route instead, but first i have to brush back up on my programming first cause i really didn't focus on that for the majority of my time studying. and i have to learn a language i'm unfamiliar with.

basically it was good moving out here to go to school cause it's cheap as ****. but now that it's time to find a job i'm wishing i was back in fl. or at least charlotte or somewhere like that. after i leave this place i'm done with the country/small towns for a while.