 I joined for a few different reasons like many people it's to travel and for education but there's also two other reasons that may be kind of weird so I heard about this job that I'm currently in from a friend that was currently in doing the job and I really liked it and I thought it was really cool and bad ass so I wanted to do it also and I also like structure which is weird I don't know I like being told what to do yeah that sounds weird yeah I like structure so that's why I joined I've been in for a little over five and a half years my current rank is Staff Sergeant E5 I set that on at my four-year mark my job is called cyber warfare operations and the control AFSC for it is 1v4 x1 I'm currently a 1v4 7-1 been in this job for over a year and a half so this is weird this job right now is still retrain only which means you would have to have a job in the Air Force or another branch that is suitable to this job so I've met some people that have got out of the Marines and came into this job there is an application and a test involved with getting into this job and that is the electronic data processing test the ADPT it is considered one of the hardest tests to take in the military it is difficult and it's designed that way to test how well and how depth you are to learning cyber things are just learning quick in general the first job I had it was I signed this job at depth it was it I just said I wanted to be in the com curve field so they gave me ground radar systems which was 3d1x5 now it's one charlie 8x3 they merged with another AFSC yep I just said hey I want to be in a com job I know it looks good on the interview if I if I held an electronic like previous job so that's what I wanted that's what my recruiter was able to give me and now I'm in this job one before x1 this job was definitely something that I wanted to do it was something I wanted to do before I even wanted to be in the Air Force like I said I had a friend that was in this job and he enjoyed it he loved it he made it sound really cool and it is really cool and I really like doing it so yes it is something that I wanted to do it something that I wanted to do that's something that I'm probably gonna do for a really long time even after I get out of the Air Force so yeah so the other job that I thought about doing was explosive ordinance disposal EOD tech just because they had to have a high asap score like that'd be pretty smart but they also had to be fit and that's something that I like doing I like working out I like doing physical stuff so it's kind of like a cross between doing something analytical and something with with my body so that was completely different but also something really interesting to me so yeah so when I first joined I signed a six-year contract and I don't regret it at all at my five-year mark which was just like 70 months ago I signed up for another five on top of my six so I'm gonna be in there force for at least 11 years so both of my tech schools my first one was about eight months that was at Keesler Mississippi Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi Mississippi the second was also there so I was there for eight months my first sex school and about six months my second tech school the first time I went through I was considered a non-priorist so I had to stay in the dorm I had to do all the other stuff that a normal person right out of basic training had to go through all the stuff and falling orders and all that other stuff the second time was I was considered a prior so I got to live off base Santa hotel have some freedom outside of the class so I really enjoyed it both times were really fun for me second time was a little bit more fun it was a little bit more stressful the course load was a lot more intense and just getting through the course for this job that I currently have was a little bit more intense we normally have a really high fellow fellow rate just because the tests are pretty difficult so I think out of the we started off with about 10 or 11 people we ended up graduating with five people so the unfortunate thing is this job you don't really go you can't really get stationed at a whole lot of places San Antonio is a huge hub for our job there's also a huge hub in Hawaii and Scott Air Force Base which is in Ohio or Illinois and then also in the DC area so those are like the four major hubs for a job you can TDY out too many bases and there's a few other bases like Georgia and Nevada Nellis Air Force Base you can get stationed at there's not a whole lot of people out in those two areas but you can get stationed there but you can TDY depending on what shop or section that you get put into or specialty there's you can TDY out to a lot of different bases depending on that so our job can go either two ways so if you do really well in tech school and you don't get any failures and you have a really high GPA which is usually only one or two students if that out of each class you go the offensive which is your typical hacking things so people that hack into other people that's what an offensive person does so since they're in the military and they work for the DOD we follow certain things like the Uniform Code of Military Justice and we follow the LOAC we have laws that abide like that we have to abide by obviously we only do title 50 and title 10 which means we only do foreign asset collection intel collection and then we do attacks on foreign assets we don't do anything with the US citizens it's only strictly foreign foreign stuff so whatever you think hacking is I don't know cyber attacks we do cyber attacks there's also defensive thing defensive a normally a lot of one before is the majority of us are defensive in nature so that means we protect the Air Force Network from any kind of foreign attacks some of the defensive posture goes out and TDIs like I said we may have an asset that we need to learn how to protect better so they'll go out there and try to figure out a defensive posture that we can take in order to deny enemy attacks cyber attacks from coming into our network and then we also do if they were able to get in we do reverse engineering on malware we do computer forensics and implement measures to make sure they don't get in again so like I said most of us that are in the shop are staff sergeants because it's a retrain only so a lot of us have already made staff I've met a few senior men but like I said most of us are staffer above there have been two non prior students that have been able to make it through the course I'm not sure how they were selected they had to go through some other tests and other tech schools before they ended up becoming in ours I'm assuming it was a rigorous process I've never heard of it before until like last month I think they graduated from our tech school as non priors so a lot of a lot of people that do what we do our staffs a lot of people I work with and some advice that I that I have given them or that we kind of just like I don't know I've come to the realization is nothing is permanent if you if you want it that way so like a lot of us get started off at a lower position like maybe doing like log analysis or are looking at traffic over the network and try to figure out which is malicious malicious which could be considered an introductory job which is rightfully so we just graduated tech school so we're gonna do something like on the lower end of the spectrum and then we gradually move up so right now I do computer forensics and I also do cyber threat emulation where I pretend to be a bad guy and try to break into our own network if you want to show that you're motivated show that you're willing to learn show that you're willing to be good at the job that you're put in and don't complain about it that's that's a huge thing people in this job if unfortunately they expect that they're gonna be like this crazy great hacker they're gonna be doing this these crazy operations it's gonna be awesome but we all start somewhere and most of us start at the bottom and work our way up to that so don't expect everything to just be exactly the way that was told to you you got to you got to work for it you got to want to show that you're motivated and you're willing to learn and be good at whatever position they want you to be in so most of my FSC is kind of not that we're paranoid but we just like to keep our social media presence low or private I'm sure if you comment on the bottom of this YouTube video I'll follow it and try to stay on top of it if you have any other questions about this job I just want to say I won't be able to talk about a whole lot of stuff with this job it is considered at a high classification level but I will try to do my best to answer any questions that you have in a non-classified way that makes sense