 You're not just a name on a piece of paper, your commander knows who you are, you're a superintendent, you're supervisor, they know what's going on, what you got going on in life. I'm Sergeant Marcus Walker. I'm the Air Force Reserve Recruiter. I'm located out here in Moore, Oklahoma, which is about 10 minutes south of Oklahoma City. I'm originally from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, but I grew up in El Paso, Texas just by being an Army brat. Originally entered the Air Force in 2010, came in as security forces, but was able to get a secondary tech school to be an academy instructor. Started out in Dover and Delaware, then transferred out to Pope Air Force Base out there at Fort Bragg, and then transferred out to Dobbins Air Reserve Base in Atlanta, Georgia. And then now I'm up here at Tinker Air Force Base as my fourth location. If you want to get in contact with me, I have Facebook, Air Force Reserve Moore slash Midwest City. And then for my Instagram, it's Air Force Reserve Oklahoma. And then I have the Twitter page, which is Air Force Reserve Staff Sergeant Marcus Walker. Can you do college while you're in the Air Force Reserves? Yep. One week in a month, you're doing a military thing. You could be a student Monday through Friday. Your military is not going to interfere with being a full-time student. Does the reserves pay for college? So you can go to college while you're in, but how are you going to afford college? What are the what is the incentive or benefits that the reserve offers there? So you have multiple routes. You have your tuition assistance. We're basically the Air Force Reserve is going to give you $4,500 to put strictly towards your tuition. And that's tuition only, not books, not fees or anything. And then as well, as long as you're a high school graduate, you're going to receive the Montgomery Giabil Select Reserve. It's not going to be the same amount compared to our active duty counterpart because as soon as you complete your base training in the tech school, you'll have access to 40% of that. I normally recommend a lot of people. I understand it's it's nice going to a four-year college, but why are you spending $10,000 and $15,000 for a English comp class that you can take out of your college? It's education classes. You're spending all this extra money for no reason. If you go to a community college, knock out your basics and transfer to a four year, your Montgomery Giabil Select Reserve will actually help cover that tuition. And then as well, depending on the career field you enlist to, there's a thing called a kicker. So the Air Force is going to give you an additional 12,000 on top of your Montgomery Giabil to put towards your career, your education. If you go on to a career field, normally it's like our two Ts, two Alphas, our three Es. It varies and it changes by time. So it all depends on the time you enlist to a career field going to, that'll determine if you're eligible for the kicker. And then as well, if you meet the requirements, you can potentially earn the post-911 Giabil. So you have to complete a certain amount of active duty days. That's not basic training in tech school. But if you meet that requirement, you'll be eligible for a post-911 Giabil. At that rate, you'll get basic allowance for housing. You'll get your base pay of the E5 and you'll get money put towards your school. So that would be off of like deployments or other, like if you go active for a little while or if you go full-time for a little while and then your deployment statuses and stuff like that all added up. Units have money to spend. And so if they have that money to bring people on orders for like six, seven, eight, nine months and somebody wants to do that, you're racking up your active duty time and that's going to help make you eligible for post-911. So the educational benefits is all going to vary on the applicant just because do they want to go to school immediately? Do they really have their mind fixed on this one job and the educational benefits don't match the, or are you willing to take a gap year to get that active duty, you know, be on some orders so you can make more bang for your buck to get the post-911 Giabil? As long as you got a decent recruiter, they're going to be taking care of and help you out to make sure you maximize the bang for your buck because like I said at the end of the day, it's one week in a month and you're coming to us to help pay for school. So we have to make sure we're hooking you up in the best way possible because unlike active duty, you're not going to another state. You know exactly where office is located. You know where our cars are. So we don't want you disgruntled, upset and then coming back and, you know, becoming a headache. We want you to be happy. So anytime you see us, you say, Hey, you know, thanks, I got my back shoes and so and so. So that way you can tell your friend, Hey, so and so helped me get my school paid for. You might want to look into it. So we're going to try our best to get them taken care of. And like I said, if it doesn't work out like out here in Oklahoma, they have a tuition waiver. So they'll pay for school. So if you do just want to go to like, for example, University of Oklahoma for freshman and senior year, I might see you to the Air National Guard because they have the tuition state waiver, but the guard is through the state itself. So he might offer state specific benefits to that, that state unit. Correct. Nice. Cool. That's cool how you guys kind of like refer each other because even when I had done the Air National Guard interview, he said, like, sometimes we'll refer people to active duty or reserve. I don't think our thing is the right fit for you. This is where you should be. It's not, you're not trying to just like car salesman people into it. Really trying to sell this car. I don't care if it's the best thing for you, but you guys are more focused on like, no, we want people to come in that are going to be happy. It's finally coming down the forefront as far as what we call total force. And when you start seeing commercials, you're going to start seeing now active duty guard and reserve because that's the big push. We're really what's sending best interest for the applicant. It's not mostly based for the jobs, but which component is going to be more beneficial for the applicant on what they're trying to accomplish? Yeah, because if they can have a good experience that reflects good on the Air Force, which then basically creates a continued perception that this is a great opportunity. If a lot of people are having good opportunities or good experiences, it just keeps pushing that it promotes itself at that point. Correct. All right. Here's a big question. Probably not a lot of people do this, but it's something that we've been asked before. Can you do Air Force ROTC when you're in the reserves? Yes, you can. So if you are not a scholarship student, you can be a reservist and you can still do the any ROTC program at college. If you do get selected to get commissioned, then it's literally a simple release from the reserve and active duty will take over. Or if you go the ROTC, you don't get picked up, the commission active duty. You can coordinate with your unit and do what's called the deserve and airman program. You'll put a package together to commission within the reserve component because you've already met all the requirements. You took the Air Force officer qualifications test. As long as everything's good to go and you have your bachelor's degree, you can go officer either ROT through active duty, or if they don't have enough slots available, you can go officer within a reserve. I'm glad you actually said that. That was going through my head. I was going to ask that and you just felt like on top of it, like answering these questions before I can even get them out. So that was good because I didn't even have that question written down. But I was curious how that would work when you had just mentioned going active duty. And I was like, hmm, I wonder what it would be like if you finished your four-year degree and we're trying to become an officer in your own unit. So that's really cool that you mentioned that. Here's one of the biggest concerns people have about serving in the military and doing college. What if I deploy while I'm going to school? I won't say it's hard to answer that question, but we're in the military. If we get called, we're called. But realistically, from what I've seen being a reservist my whole career, a lot of people volunteer for deployment and as well as a reserve component, we're small. You're not just a name on a piece of paper. Your commander knows who you are. You're a superintendent. You're a supervisor. They know what's going on, what you got going on in life. So if they do have a task in for deployment and you're in school, they're probably going to have somebody, too many volunteers anyway, and not put you on at rotation. If it's one of those all hands on deck, you coordinate with your Veterans Affairs office at your actual college and they'll coordinate with the actual school to get you taken care of as well. So that way your school doesn't disenroll you or anything like that because at once again, you're federally protected. You're getting activated into the on title 10 orders. So the school has to hold your standing as far as a student because you were a student when you got activated. It's not hard. It's just it's one of those is going to be on a case to case basis because you never know what that activation might be. It could be a humanitarian relief and it has to be all hands on deck or it could just be that it's that year everybody has to go and we just need 15 bodies to head up head out and you're in school. Don't worry about it. So we've talked about the college benefits of after you join. But what if somebody wants to college before they join and they're just drowning in debt from going to college? Does the reserves offer a repayment program for student loans that you've already taken out? Well, we do. But honestly, it's the student loan repayment plan is basically they're going to give you $10,000 put your tuition or towards that your debt. What we normally do is tell them, hey, we're going to try and place you into a job as a assigning bonus because it's going to be more than that $10,000. You take that money and as long as you're being smart and put it towards your debt instead of brand new system in your car, then we're helping you pay for that. We do offer it, but we normally try and push people towards the signing bonus just because it's a lot more money to put towards their college loans. Okay. And so with that repayment program, is there like a stipulation to that? Like if you use that, you forfeit any other benefits or? You can't take the sign. So if you're going to a career filled as a signing bonus, you can't use the student loan repayment. So it's basically the same thing. You got a bigger choose. You want the $15,000 and you want this $10,000. Normally, we tell everybody, take $15,000 and a slot more money is going to help up. Yeah. Good. That's good to know. So with the GI bill, can you get the GI bill like active duty does? So we have the Montgomery and a post 911. How do you those work or a reservist? So it's the same. As soon as you complete basic training in tech school, you'll have access to your Montgomery GI bill, select reserve, and that's only 40%. The longer you stay in the reserve component, the more that percentage is going to go up. If you do not use your Montgomery GI bill, select reserve, you can transfer that to a spouse or your children. So if you don't use it, you can just transfer that down the line. So like I said, a spouse or kids. What's the requirements for transferring it to your children or your spouse? So my office partner, he actually transferred his educational benefits to his wife. Okay. He can actually answer that question for you. So once I reached the six year mark and I had, at that point, I had the, I had the GI bill for myself because I came in active duty. So it's a little bit different Sergeant Walker coming in with a traditional reservist role. But once I reached that, it was really as simple as, you know, you just get in the system, you be in the system as far as, you know, you being able to gain access to all the education benefits and everything. And obviously you would have your family members and everything listed. And it's really, at that point, just as simple as, you know, doling out, you know, how you want to split it up and you just disperse it, you know, however many months that you want to go. In my case, I was giving it at that point, a lot of it to my wife, so she could go to school. But then you also have children. So what she didn't use, I kind of put back some to me and then kind of placed it out, you know, evenly distributed it to my kids, you know, when they become of age to be able to go to college. But to your directly to your question, it was that six year mark. Now, Sergeant Walker would be able to answer better as far as, is he traditional reservist? No, no, he's not. He's prior service active duty. Okay. Okay. So you're looking at, is he? No, no, no. It's for other people, other people. So like for reservists, how would that work? It's the same six years. So it's the same. So, okay, it says it says active duty reserve on this that we're pulling up. Yeah, it looks like it's just at the six year mark. So really, it is just about that total timeframe. It's not about being active duty and having to be a career. It's just about how much, how much of a percentage of your GI ability you have. And then once you have that, that six year mark, you can transfer whatever you got to be a hundred percent six year mark. Okay. So it should be a hundred percent of that your mark anyway. So it should be good. That's, that's something that you can tell, tell other people to now when they're joining. We all just learned something new. Yeah. My, I always tell people to the Air Force has so many benefits and opportunities that like you can't know about all of them. There's just too many opportunities for veterans and military members. And like it's crazy how many opportunities they offer. It's almost overwhelming when you're in like trying to decide between all these opportunities you want to take advantage of, like it's just your bombardous so much. Oh yeah.