 I joined the Air Force because I have a history of people in my family being in the Air Force. My dad was in the Air Force during Desert Storm and my grandfather was in the Air Force during Vietnam. While I was in high school I joined the ROTC program and that helped me get A1C immediately as soon as I joined BMT. I've been in the Air Force for just over three years. I hit my three year mark back in June and my current rank right now is Senior Airman. The name of my job is Aerospace Propulsion and I don't think that's really a great name for it because it doesn't really describe to you what exactly it is but my job is basically a jet engine mechanic and the AFSC for that job is 2α6x1. I got this job while I signed an open contract and before I went to BMT my open contract was for open mechanical so I was going to get only mechanical jobs. Absolutely this job was definitely something I wanted to do. When I saw the description for this job while I was at BMT when we were there selecting our jobs I saw it and read the description and it definitely intrigued me a lot because I love to get my hands dirty and to specialize in the engine sounded really really good to me. I wanted to do anything that involved mechanical stuff so I just wanted to I didn't want to sit behind a desk all day I just wanted to get out there move around and just turn wrenches all day basically that's a there's nothing better than seeing my finished product just fly away on an F16. I only signed a four-year contract the sign-on bonus for a six-year for me was only two grand and I didn't think that was good enough to sign an extra two years and then I didn't know if I was gonna like it or completely hate it so I was just gonna do my four years and if I like it then I was just going to remiss. My tech school was at Shepherd Air Force Base in Wichita Falls, Texas so as soon as you get out of BMT you're just gonna take a bus all the way up there it's about an eight-hour drive. My tech school was just over three months long I got there in August of 2016 and I left in late November of 2016. I definitely kind of sorta enjoyed tech school for the most part when I was in class I thought it was really really fun I got to learn a bunch of new stuff that I've never knew before and especially with it being my top pick job I definitely just love to get my hands dirty learning about the engine. While we're there we had a couple of Saudi Arabian students from their military in our class I made friends with them and they actually turned out to be really cool people but while I was in my room on the weekends and after class I didn't really do too much I just kind of stayed in my room and played Xbox pretty much. I wish I kind of did get out of my room and go see a little bit more than I did I only ever went to the mall while I was in Wichita Falls and I got my first tattoo there. With this job on the AFSC you'll be assigned a shred at the end and that's just a letter tacked on and it's just a it basically narrows down more about what you're going to be doing in your job. For me I got E shred and you're only going to hold that that shred for while you're a one level in tech school and then once you get your three level when you get out and I was E shred so that just basically narrows down what engine you're going to be working on and what aircraft it's going to go into and once you hit your five level you're going to get a different shred and that all depends on which shred you started out with first pretty much. With this job the bases you can go to as a three level it's pretty limited there's not very not very much but there are definitely desirable bases that you can go to as a three level. So as a three level you can go to some of the most desirable ones are Aviano in Italy you can go to Japan you can go to England and some stateside bases are Shaw Air Force Base, Mountain Home Idaho and Beale Air Force Base in California. Basically with this job it's just maintenance pretty much all the time we usually do mostly unscheduled maintenance which means if something breaks at a certain time on a jet engine and if it can't be fixed out on the flight line then it will be brought back to the back shop and then that's basically where I'm located there's two different sections to this job where you place that. You can be placed on the flight line or you can be placed in the back shop and right now I'm placed in the back shop. In the back shop you're going to go a lot more in-depth onto the jet engine you can tear it all the way down completely to just all bolts just bagged up and scattered everywhere and then every component just laid out on their specific stands and on the flight line you hopefully in that job you want to be able to fix what you can while you're out there and then if it just literally cannot cannot you cannot get to it at all then you'll have to download that engine and bring it back to the back shop and then another section of this job is scheduled maintenance and that's when a jet reaches a certain amount of flying hours and it's got to come in for an inspection it's got to be a basically we're in a 6k upgrade program which is when the engine reached 6,000 tax then we have to tear it all the way down and upgrade it and build it back up. In the back shop I work 9 hour days 5 days a week and sometimes you'll get weekend duty and on the flight line they work a lot more than we do because they're with the jet all the time and that they have to make sure it flies at a certain amount of time that day most a lot of the time they'll they'll be on 12 hour shifts not all the time but it's it's common. Okay so with this job you can get a A&P license and the A&P license is an airframe and power plant license you'll definitely need that in the civilian world if you want to continue continue this career and you get out and there's there's a bunch of other licenses you can get that'll make you a little bit more desirable like right now I'm pursuing my ground radio operators license on top of my A&P license so once I get out I'll definitely be a desirable candidate for any other job that I might want. This job's deployment tempo is quite high especially if you're on the flight line they will they'll be deploying quite a bit specifically at my base you will they have three different F16 AMUs which is just maintenance squadrons on the flight line they usually deploy on six month rotation so one AMU will go for six months they'll come back the next AMU will go for six months and so on. I'm planning on getting out after my first enlistment I have less than a year left I do have some people that I have connections with on the outside that are working in the aircraft maintenance field I did a tour of Delta and their maintenance facilities and it just definitely is intriguing and the money is definitely more on the outside than I'm making now in my mind it just doesn't make sense for me to stay in when there's a lot more opportunities on the outside that I can pursue. I would probably stay in this current job because I do love it a lot I love to get my hands dirty in this job but if I had to pick a different job that I would be a part of it would probably be weather because I always been intrigued my whole life about meteorology and I'd love to get in the office and just predict weather for all the pilots and stuff because I did get to tour a weather squadron one time and it was very very cool looking in there all the monitors with different weather patterns and everything going on it just really looked interesting to me. The advice I would give to a new airman showing up at my shop would be to definitely soak up all the information that you can about the engine because it's it's definitely crucial to the job to know components and stuff like that because if you don't know your terms and your components and it's going to be very hard to read your technical data to make sure you know exactly what you're doing and follow the correct instructions. Some advice you might hear from other people once you show up is that you should forget everything that you learned in tech school to some degree that might be true but for the most part it's not true at all you should definitely soak up the information that you learned about the engine because once you get to the shop then some things might look a little bit different than they did in tech school because the engine has been upgraded since then they have old parts at tech school but for the most part it should look very familiar to you and should definitely retain the information that you learned.