 Welcome back to the Cyber Underground. Yes, I'm back. You could not get rid of me. I'm Dave, the professor, no longer the cyber guy because there's an actual cyber guy out there. Sorry. But the professor sticks because, you know, I work at the University of Hawaii, Capulian Community College. I teach ethical hacking and network security. And I have to repeat that every time because you guys need to know where I'm coming from in my universe. New background. Hope you love it. Please don't be a hater. Yes, I teach you to college right outside of Waikiki. Now with that, let's go into how we're going to assist our veterans. I'm one. I got one with me. Former Command Sergeant Major of the United States Army retired. Welcome, Robert Bullin. Thank you, Dave. I'm honored to have you here, sir. Thank you very much. Tell us a little bit about who you are, where you came from, and what you do and why you do it. Okay, because I know we've both got a passion for this. Yeah, let me know. I did 30 years active duty army and did as a Command Sergeant Major. Was that a purpose or you had to do that instead of prison? Well, you know, things that won't be said. But it was really, it was a really good thing. I retired, followed my wife back here. She's a local girl. So we came back here to Hawaii. Good for you, man. And then after 30 years of being in the military and not around my wife all the time, she's like, you have to do something. Get out. Exactly. Pretty much get a job, do something. So I took advantage of the G.I. Bill. And as I was going to school, there was a position that opened up for the community colleges and they wanted to do veteran outreach. So I'm like, okay, maybe I could do that. Because it was really important for me because I didn't know where to start. Yes, I know there's websites. There's all this nice stuff out there. But in the military, you say if you have a problem, you go to the individual, they'll talk to you, and then they'll set you on the right path. Well, that one person for me was at Leeward Community College and her name was Leanne Egan. Now let's back up a second. You were there in a Hawaiian Studies program. I was. Which I got to tell you, I'm grateful you did that. It's nice to know that people that come to the islands actually care about the Hawaiian culture and history. So you went in there and you got your AA, right? I did. I got an AA in Hawaiian Studies. I have a deep appreciation for the islands. I have a connection to the island. That's spiritual for lack of a better term. And I really enjoyed it. And I wanted to find out why I was feeling the way I did when I when I stepped foot on the INA. So it was a really good experience for me. Well, as that was winding down, all of a sudden they said, hey, we need somebody to talk to veterans about going to school specifically for cybersecurity and the healthcare field. And that's where me and you started that friendship and working on the TAC4 grant. So the TAC4 grant was something that came out of the Obama administration. We're on the tail end of that. I believe that was around four of that grant. We had approximately $10 million to spread over 10 campuses of the UH system in the state. And it had to be split between healthcare and cybersecurity. And you had to handle both. And we went around and you go around a lot of bases, talk to people in person, shake a lot of hands, tell people how's it going. And we created programs at the universities to support those efforts, yes, like curriculum and certificates, especially the certificates. And another thing with the outreach was to kind of tie in the military military bases and the folks that they have going to school there with the universities and show how how they could work together. So I think with that cybersecurity program, and then you enlighten me to a lot of different things that cybersecurity is like a nice umbrella. And there's a lot of other different things that fall up in there. A lot of different pathways in there. Exactly, along with certifications. And I still use what you say. If you like to sit and you're very neat and put papers where they have to be kind of like military regimented, then you need to be a programmer. If you want to sit up all night. Let's take a different path. Okay. If you're neat and you're organized, no, you're a database administrator. Excuse me, if you love chaos and you have beer cans and monster and you play Fortnite all night. That's a program or a hacker or a hacker. Yeah, but then you'd have 16 screens and four different computers at all times. You make it sound like that's a problem. It's not a problem. I really like it. And it opened my eyes to a lot of different things within the community college system and going back to what I experienced getting out of the military. What I want to talk about in a way is when you get out of the military, you have to go through your transition. All the branches go through and nobody's paying attention. I hate to say that they have some good people teaching classes, but you've already detached yourself from the military and you're on to the next thing in my civilian life. Well, it's a lot better than it used to be. Oh, much, much better. When I got out, it was gosh, the early 90s. And it was the gate shut behind me. And I still released, I had my bus ticket. Wow. That was it. Yeah. And nobody told me squat after that. And you know, most people go upon their uniforms or whatever. Yeah, I didn't know what to do. And I just wanted into community college by mistake. They didn't know how to get rid of me. So I just started taking classes. There you go. What was it like when you got out and how did we move to the new model that is still kind of challenging? Well, when I got out, it's they throw a lot of information at you. You feel like you're drinking from the fire hose, but you've already detached from the military. And you already have a plan or so you think was that Mike Tyson, everybody has a plan until they get hit in the mouth. Well, once you get out the gate, and you start thinking this great next thing, and you realize, Oh, that's not working, or it's not as easy as you think. Right. Then you have to do something. And it's either go get a job and trust me after I got out of the military after 30 years, I kind of hung out and did jobs. Um, was a trolley driver in Waikiki. As a matter of fact, for a company, enjoyed that. Then I decided, you know, let me go to school. Didn't know what I wanted to do. And like I say, at Leeward Community College, I went to their website. Nice website. But I'm like, what do I do called someone? And that's what's so important about my title. The title is not important. But what I do is as veterans outreach, I work with the veterans and even active duty folks that want to go to school, but they don't know where to start. Well, let's start by telling them where Leeward College is now. That's the college that's closest to Pearl Harbor. Yes. And Hickam Air Force Base, which is a joint base now. Correct. And it's also the college that Community College is closest to the newest for your university in that UH system, UH West. Correct. It's also right on the new rail line. So when that opens up in about 20 years, we'll get a rail line next those campuses together. So it's, it's a great campus. It's an up and coming campus. It's got a wonderful view of Pearl Harbor outside of the back, right? Yeah, exactly. So when I get folks that want to go to school, I don't pick campuses for them. I ask them what's more convenient for you because of the traffic and the situations that they have to go through. So it's like, which campus is better for you? I make an appointment with them and I will give them a tour of the campus. And I will show them all the people that are that have to be involved, such as the processing people. Who are your counselors there? Where do you have to turn your health records to? Where do you turn in your transcripts to? Now, we need this as military folks because that transition from military to civilian life, you get used to your chain of command. You know how the systems and processes work. And when you come out and you get into civilian life, it's the Wild West. Exactly. It's going every which way, but loose. And so when you come into academia, it's just one step shy of the Wild West. Exactly. And you have to show them, here's how you work the bureaucracy. Exactly. And what's nice about it is going back to the military, we're used to having sponsorships, no matter what base you went to, from me going from Germany over to the states and then having a PCF transition to another base. We always had someone on the other end that met us and your family and says, hey, let me show you around, let me show you the ropes, let me show you where you got to go. So it was important for me to not only, even though Lee Wood was my home campus, to know about Kapielani, to know about Honolulu Community College, to know about Wynward Community College, and also the Outer Islands. So it's not just Oahu-centric. I also cover all the outlying campuses on the other islands. So the UH system has 10 physical campuses. Correct. And that covers four of the major islands at a nine. Correct. And we're on Maui, Kauai, the big island of Oahu. Correct. So you go to all those. Correct. And they also have extension campuses, one on Moloka'i and they also have one on Lanai. And there's two physical campuses of Hawaii Community College on the big island, right? There's Kailua Kona and there's one down in Hilo. Yes, the one in Hilo and then the Palamanui campus over in Kona. I have not visited yet, but I've seen it on Google Maps and it looks very pretty. Yeah. Is it nice? It's, I haven't been there yet. Small. Very small. And especially with the military population, there is a very small contingency of the Hawaii Army Guard over there. So that's, well, that's the Oahuakalua training facility that's right near there. Not necessarily. It's in the middle of the island. Yeah, the Oahuakalua is in the middle, but Palamanui's on one side and Hilo's on the other side. Kind of by the airport, I thought. So if you're looking at a map, Palamanui is very close to Kailua Kona airport, right? Correct. So for the people in cheap seats, if you're going to go out there and look at Google Maps, go and look at the island of Hawaii, the big island, and the top left corner, you'll see the Kailua Kona airport. And then right near there is the Palamanui campus for Hawaii Community College. And they do not have cybersecurity yet, although I've been pestering them and poking them. Yes, you should. But the one down at Hilo does. Yes. So we cover cybersecurity and healthcare. And healthcare, we had a particular mission in healthcare now. Yes, we did. It was to get healthcare workers. Yes. They wanted community health workers, and they also wanted school health aides, which was a great opportunity. I think the marketing could have been a little bit better towards that, towards, say, family members of active duty component folks, because they can get in as a school health aide. And there was a very big shortage for, they had school nurses. However, there wasn't, it was a very lack of certification. So this enabled them to go through specific training. And for the onset of the program, it was free. Yeah, you bring up a really neat point. So it's not only the veterans that get support, but now there's veteran spouses get a tremendous amount of support. Exactly. They've actually beefed up their website that the military has to support these spouses. So if the, like you or I get out of the military, we don't want to take advantage of our GI bill, we can sponsor our family. Correct. Hand that down to our wife or a child. Exactly. Wife and child. Now with the forever GI bill now, they can have, it doesn't expire anymore. So that's a good thing. Especially when we talk about veterans, sometimes I don't want to dis, I don't want to put away the active duty components. And there's the guard, there's the reserve. Okay. And then there's us guys, retirees. I'm kind of like not the norm. Most folks go in the military, they'll do one tour, they'll do two tours, and then they get out. That's me, right? You know, no benefits, no base access. Exactly. Just the GI bill. But you still, and the ironic part of that is, is we go into the military to do a job. And then we get out. It's not necessarily exactly what we want to do when we get out. When you got out, you weren't going to be a cop. When I got out, I was a tanker at first, which is an armor crewman, one much call for being a tanker when I got out. You'd be a big bus driver, maybe? Pretty much a trolley, you know. And the military, I think they've changed, I've been retired 11 years. When you were in, you had to take classes that kind of mirrored what your job was in the army, for me, for the army. So being in recruiting, it was more into the business management or any type of administration. Well, you lucked out, because that's a good transition to civilian life. That is. But most of us didn't. Correct. I had to do law enforcement. When I got out, of course, I was straight into the LAPD, which was not for me. Really? Yeah, no, no, I could not take the job. I just, I couldn't, when I saw what I was going to have to be doing, and this was the early 90s, when they, when they were filming the movie Colors. Oh, nice. So, you know, you could walk down Hollywood Boulevard and find nine millimeter shells. And I thought, you know, I just don't want to do this. It's not me. I think I'll go back to college. Almost like a contractor with that. Well, we'll hire you on for six months. Let's see if you make it through. Right. And if you don't, we'll bury you. Right, free of charge. So it's hard when you walk out that gate. Right now, we have the transitioning vet programs. Right. So about six months before, it's supposed to be six months before you get a little bit more free time to take these classes on developing your resume. Right. Scouting colleges. What else do they do in the six months? Depending on if you want to be, if you want to start your own business, they have entrepreneur classes as well. Yeah. And they just get you ready. And it's 18 to six months out, no sooner than 18 months, no later than six months. And it's a requirement now. And with the op tempo, I know, well, but with the op tempo going down now, the operations tempo, they're not deploying out as much as they used to. The soldiers are kind of easing into it now. So it's not like, okay, we're going to, we're going to get rid of you or you're going to process you out of the military, go to this class, go ahead, you're done. I hit the gate. So they're not just checking numbers anymore. They're actually doing a good job. And they are doing a wonderful job at the transition points for everybody. It's just do the military folks take advantage of it. And like I was saying earlier, sometimes, you know, their brain is somewhere else. So they come to, you know, a realization, I want to go to school. Good. Who do they contact? Me, if they can't, you know, but my name is out there. It's on the websites and all contact. And you put them in all the educational centers. Your name is all all the educational centers around the bases here in the islands. But in other states, where would if I was getting out at say, Lackland, Texas, where would I go? Is there a permanent station on base on every base that has this resource? No, there's not. Basically, how it would work is if you decide on a school that you want to go to, check it out, look at how to apply. There should be, and I can't speak for all universities out there, but a site for veterans or military University of Anchorage at Alaska has a wonderful website for veterans. I mean, it has everything and it connects with a lot of links to the VA programs, healthcare, student veterans of America, clubs and chapters and also, yeah, they can get a lot of information that way. I provide them that information as well, but mine is more like the hands on. I want to take them. Let's talk about that a little bit more right after the break. Okay. We got to take a break. Pay some bills. We'll come right back until then, Stacey. Aloha. I'm Marsha Joyner, inviting you to come visit with us on cannabis chronicles, a 10,000-year odyssey where we explore and examine the plant that the news has given us and stay with us as we explore all of the facets of this planet on Wednesdays at noon. Please join us. Aloha. Hello, everyone. I'm DeSoto Brown, the co-host of Human Humane Architecture, which is seen on Think Tech Hawaii every other Tuesday at 4 p.m. And with the show's host, Martin Despeng, we discuss architecture here in the Hawaiian Islands and how it not only affects the way we live, but other aspects of our life, not only here in Hawaii, but internationally as well. So join us for Human Humane Architecture every other Tuesday at 4 p.m. on Think Tech Hawaii. Welcome back to the Cyber Underground. We're taking care of our vets today and it's not just about cybersecurity, about education and transitioning out of the military, hanging up your uniform, and coming into the civilian life. And most of our veterans go back home. We want you to stay. A tremendous amount of experience, your motivation, and your skill set really benefit the islands. So don't go away. Join us as part of our family. With us here today, Robert Bullin. Hey, Dave. Hey, good to be back. Welcome back, man. All right. We're talking about, if I'm in the military, I'm on the tail end of my tour, I'm thinking about hanging up the uniform. Military career is not for me, but I did my service. I want to transition out. I want to take advantage of my GI bill because if I don't, I'm kind of stupid. I got to do this. Where do I start? What's my first stop in this journey? Well, here on the islands, you can, if you want to go to a four-year, do you want to go to a two-year? What if I don't know? If you don't know, then I suggest you do your homework and do some research and see what is your passion? What do you want to do? And if you're not sure, then go to school, use your GI bill, and take a liberal arts class. And then maybe somewhere in there, you'll figure out what your true joy and passion is. That's a great tip. When I first got back, when I got out, that's exactly what I did. I got myself a job. I think I delivered pizza. And it was a pretty good hourly, and I could take part-time college. And I just experimented. That first two years of college was the best six years of my life. I just tried it all, man. You're on the John Volusian progress. Yes, I was. And I had a great time, and I met a lot of great people, and I realized that the community colleges were where the professors really took a vested interest in your journey. It wasn't just about, hey, I'm teaching physics. Come here, learn, go out. It was, is this the right thing for you? Should you be a math major, a music major, a marketing major? What should you do? What's your passion? Like you said, they give you personality tests. They hook you up with a counselor that can guide you. And it's okay to take your time. You don't want to rush through pre-engineering and find out, I hate it. That's horrible. You've wasted your money, wasted your time, and now you're in a career that you can make good money, but you're miserable. Exactly. And what's an unspoken resource is the camaraderie that you miss from the military. And why I say that's a resource that the community colleges, or even at the four-year, is you're just out of the military. You're not alone. There's other veterans on that campus. And veterans tend to hang with veterans, and they're great personal mentors or peer mentors that they'll come out there, help you. Oh, what about this class? What about that class? This is the teacher you might want to see. This is the one you want to stay away from. That's great advice. So seek out other veterans. Exactly. One of the worst things I experienced when I first walked out the gate was that terrible sense of loneliness. You know, I just left the friends I'd been around for for years on the other side of that fence, and I'm the only guy walking away at that time. Where do I go? All my other friends from high school are gone. My college buddies are off to the universities. I'm going back to my hometown or wherever, and I'm pretty much alone. So that's a great tip. Go to your veterans resource center on campus. Correct. And the University of Hawaii system has done a great job on that. Most all campuses have a veteran resource center, and that's just a place where the veterans can come. They have computers in there for them to use. They have lending libraries where you haven't got your stipend for the books. Just go see if they have the book there that you need. Sign it out and you can use the book. Another great tip. So the GI bill is not always a 100% no-fail system. There have to be backups in place, and the veterans outreach centers on campus can be the ones. This lending library is a great one. If your money from your GI bill isn't in yet, you're forced to use the bookstore with the GI bill. If the bookstore doesn't have the book, your veterans outreach center can probably help you obtain the book or at least a copy of the first couple of chapters. Exactly. It gets you into the class, so you don't have to drop. And another thing is, as a veteran transitioning out of the military, you have, like you mentioned, a wealth of knowledge. Well, where is that knowledge documented? It's on your joint service transcripts. We call them JSTs. Okay, so don't minimize what you've done in the military. You might have been a tanker, an infantryman, or a cargo handler. However, your joint service transcript shows what you did. You are not given college credit. You might have earned college credit based on what you've done. And the counselors at all the community colleges and in the UH system are good at that. They do the prior learning assessment. They do a prior learning assessment, and there's several ways of doing that. One is through CLEP tests, the Dante's test systems. We have credit by examination for the different campuses or the classes. But another one is portfolio, where you amass writings on what you did in the military, and they will assess it through the professors. But the one I like is your joint service transcript. Well, usually we go through that and we take all the trainings you went through, and we see if the learning outcomes of those exercises you did in the military matched the learning outcomes from specific courses that we offer. And if you amass enough student learning outcomes and it matches a set that covers an entire course, you get those three credits or four credits for that class. That could reduce the amount of time you have to spend in college, reduce the amount of credits that you have to pay for with the GI bill, and maybe let you take your GI bill all the way into the master's. Exactly. And when military folks use their JSTs and get credit, they're more likely to continue on with their degree. And like you say, go into the master's program, but it's also a way for them to save their money because it's not an open source of money. There is an end to the money. You get a finite amount of money. There is a finite amount. So how do you maximize the money with the community colleges and stuff? Yeah, it's cheaper than the four years. So they can go that, go that round if they don't have to pay for as many classes, that's fine, and it saves their money on the back end. So I recommend for all of our veterans or the transitioning veterans or even the ones that are in active duty now that think that they're not going to go forward or even if they think they are, I recommend taking advantage of things like the Community College of the Air Force or just Community College is off base because some of the MOSs of the Military Occupational Specialty will be our basic rate of eight-hour a day job and you can go to night school, pick up some credits before you get out. Well, one of the good initiatives that the University of Hawaii Community College is starting is now they are moving towards in the fall an online AA degree. Yeah, I saw that. It's a great initiative. The beauty of it is it's going to be online and they're doing it in five-week increments. So they're moving towards helping out the active duty folks with their operations tempo where they don't have time to take a 16-week course online nor do they have time to sit in class for 16 weeks and it's during the day. I think the audience is panicking. So audience, please be aware that these five-week courses are not an entire 12-unit semester. You take one course at a time. Yes. Just be calm. Breathe. Then find your center. Focus. One course, five weeks, then you move to the next course. Correct. It's kind of neat because in this format it actually replicates the military training model. You're in there, you take one topic, you master it, you move on. Exactly. And that's how the military people are trained. So it's an easier model to adopt. And as you're in the military, it's easier to consume that information because you're used to that learning model. And it's good for the active duty folks, like you say, but also if the veterans, the ones that have gotten out, if you want to do that, fine. But if you're not sure about going to school, it's been a while, you might want to just take the actual regular class and 16 weeks and don't overload. One advice I give to my veterans is, okay, I know you want to start and you want to do this, you want to get done. But if you haven't been to school in four to eight years because you've been in the military, don't all of a sudden load yourself up with six or seven classes. It's not going to ease yourself into it. Now, to be full-time, you need four classes at least. You have to have 12 credits, 12 credit hours, and a semester system to be considered full-time for full benefits with the post-911 GI. So here's another mistake a lot of people make. And I see this in the IT field, right? The counselors at the community college will say, you know, you haven't gone to school for a long time. I tell you what, before you pick a major, before you decide, just take all your general ed requirements. So they take, you know, a year and a half of nothing but general ed, and then they come into the IT group, for example, and they take nothing but IT courses. The failure rate is extreme when you take all of one topic. But there's multiple things. Like you said, there's so many channels, like just cybersecurity. You took a database course. You took a programming course. You took a networking course. I took a hacking course. I took them all at the same time. I'm going to go crazy. Exactly. So you throw in an English course. Throw in, you know, I don't know, a basket weaving. Whatever. You lighten it up, take some general ed, and some of your topics. And a lot of things that people don't realize this, when you go into college, as you know, there is a linear path for some courses that you must follow. Some courses you can't take until you've taken the previous course. That's a prerequisite, right? And especially in things like engineering, you must follow that course. And if you don't take the right couple of courses in the beginning, when you get to the end, you've got to come back and take those, and you could spend six years getting a bachelor's degree. You don't want to do that. It's a waste of time. Right. And I would like to say the counselors are getting a lot better at that, especially when it's not a you need to take this. It's what are you looking for? What do you want to do and try different things? When I went to school, it wasn't with the idea of getting a Hawaiian studies degree. It was, I want to take the classes I couldn't take when I was active duty. So I wanted the astronomy. You know, I just wanted to take astronomy. I thought that would be very interesting. I wanted to take oceanography. Astronomy wasn't one of the best courses I ever took. I loved it. I did. To this day, I know what a parsec is. On rye? On rye with Swiss cheese? That's right. I love that sandwich. So another recommendation, if you have to give to us with our last couple of minutes of the show, walk us through what I should do as a veteran who's already completed my educational goals. I'm in a career and I want to get back. I want to help my brothers and sisters transitioning out of the military to come into civilian life. What do I go? I would say what you should do is contact the Veterans Resource Centers on the community colleges or it could be one college pick one, a home campus like Leeward. And Leanne Egan does a wonderful job as a veteran counselor because she also does coordination with veterans and she's had veteran fairs where she'll have veteran owned businesses or veterans that are working for different companies if they want to come in. It's kind of like a career fair job fair. So you know that you make that connection with an actual veteran like, hey, I'm hiring, what are you looking at? That's a good idea. Veterans for veterans. Veterans for veterans. And it's almost, you feel more comfortable talking to someone that's experienced what you did. No matter, I mean, we kid each other with the branches that we were in, but it's a brother and sister. That transition is very similar for many of us. Coming out of whatever situation we're in the military into civilian life, we all have to transition and another veteran can relate to us spiritually better than anybody else in civilian world. Thanks for being with us. Is there anything you want to go out with the last couple of seconds? Last couple of seconds is if anybody's looking at going to school in the natural, please go to the website, uhcc.hawaii.edu and or contact me on my email that's rbullen at hawaii.edu. I'm more than willing to help you out. Just give me an email. All right, so when we put this on YouTube, I'll take your contact information if you don't mind and I'll put it on that episode. So when people watch this episode, they can see your contact info. Excellent. How's that? Does that work for you? That'll work. Thanks for being with me, brother. Thank you so much, brother. All right, everybody. Thanks for joining us on this special episode to help our veterans here on the cyber underground. We'll see you next week. Until then, stay safe.