Hello, once again!
Though this post is 5 months (yikes) later than it probably should have been, I just felt like writing today so here you go! I hope to put out several short-ish posts to break up the huge amount of things that have been going on in my life, so this one is pretty much just about my first couple days in SC.
My dad was kind enough to make the long drive with me to SC from Colorado. We went pretty quickly, going from Colorado Springs to Topeka, KS the first day (we weren’t able to start driving until mid-afternoon), and making a brief stop in Osawatomie on the second day before we continued to Nashville, TN. The third day of driving we broke up by stopping at the Biltmore Mansion in North Carolina, which was truly extraordinary.
I moved in with Jackson, a friend I made at Officer school in Newport, for the couple weeks between arriving and closing on my house. He lives just around the corner from me, so it worked out very nicely! The very next day dressed up in my summer whites and drove 10 minutes down the road to check into the base. My sponsor met me in the parking lot and brought me in and got me started on all of my first-day activities, including getting my internet card to log onto the base network, getting my badge to get past security on my own, and getting a parking permit sticker for my car. Before I left for the day I got to meet the other members of the E-Math division, and got a brief overview of what my life would look like for the next few months.
Before I get into that, though, I think I should go over a few terms that I will be using a lot in future emails! In my position, I am considered a “DIO,” or Direct Input Officer. DIOs are essentially people that came to the base through the NUPOC program. We don’t have any sea experience, we just came directly to this shore command from college.
The students in the school are divided into different “ratings” which determines what kind of job they will have on the ship. They receive slightly different classes while at the school depending on what their rating is. There are MMs, also called Machinists, who work on mechanical components of the ship connecting to the reactor like pumps and pipes and valves, EMs, Electricians, who work more with the electrical systems, and ETs, Reactor Operators, who will actually work with and man the reactor itself. Very generally speaking, ETs are picked from the best of the best ASVAB scores, the EMs from a lower bracket, and MMs from a lower bracket still. There are always exceptions, but across the board MMs struggle much more (at least with Math) than the ETs. The ratings are part of the title of a service member. A nuclear-trained machinist mate who is an E-5 (Petty Officer Second Class) whose name is Smith would be “MMN2 Smith”. If that is a lot to wrap your head around, I completely agree. Unless I am really confident, I generally just call people “petty officer,” which is a correct form of address for 90% of the students in the school.
The Structure of the School
Within the schoolhouse, there are actually three different schools that are all operating in tandem. There is the A-School, which is where enlisted personnel come right after boot camp if they are selected for the nuclear program. The goal of A-school is to refresh the relevant high-school knowledge that the students should already have and ease them into some of the concepts they will learn once they get into Power School. It is a 6-month program, and very time intensive, though the material is not particularly difficult. Most of the teachers at A-school are enlisted members who have already been on a sea duty or two, and are here for a shore duty rotation. There are also some officers there, including some DIOs like me, but that is not the first place any of us go to teach. Some DIOs have the opportunity to transfer to A-school to be a division director.
Then there is E-NPS, the Enlisted Nuclear Power School. That is where I am teaching right now. It is also a 6-month program, and is divided into three first-half divisions and four second-half divisions. The first-half divisions include E-HTFF (Enlisted Heat Transfer and Fluid Flow), E-Physics, and E-Math (where I am teaching). When a new DIO comes to the base, he/she is put into one of these three for their first division. After teaching first-half for about a year and a half, they move on to somewhere else. Normally to teaching a second-half division, but there are a few other paths that I might talk about later. The second-half subjects are E-RP (Reactor Principles) which teaches students about how reactors work, E-RPT (Reactor Plant Technologies) which teaches students the layout of the mechanical components of the plant like pipes and pumps, E-SI (Special Instruction) which teaches different things particular to each rating (MM, EM, or ET), and E-CMR (Chemistry, Materials, and Radiation health), whose name describes very well what they teach.
To give you a rough idea of just how insane the pacing is in A-School and Power School, enlisted students earn roughly 70 transferable college credits in their 12 months of time going through those two programs. That is insane. I didn’t have that many credits until my junior year in college, even with taking the max load every semester!
Finally, there is O-NPS, the Officer Power School. This is where the DIOs who chose to be officers on a sub or surface vessel go through, and is very much like E-NPS except much, much more in depth.
If you are interested in reading more about the schools, I highly suggest the Wikipedia article about it! It is actually very informative.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Power_School
The Structure of the Division
From most to least senior in the division we start with LT Waterman. Waterman is the division director (also called “DIV-O”), and is nearing the end of his 5 year commitment at the base. He is a prior marine who transferred into the Navy through the NUPOC program while he was getting his degree. He is essentially my immediate boss. He works through a lot of the curriculum management and reports to the department head, making sure our division is keeping up with qualifying new people and having enough manning to teach all of the classes. I couldn’t ask for a better boss! Waterman is very a very to-the-point person, and isn’t afraid to give new people large responsibilities. He likes to see things getting done, and as long as things are getting done he doesn’t interfere very much at all. I’m done with everything I need to do for the day at 2:00 pm? “Awesome. Good job, go home and enjoy your day.” He is an early riser, and generally tries to form his schedule to roughly a 6:00-2:00 daily schedule. I hope to get to that point myself before too long, but there is a lot that keeps me at school later than that so far! Waterman is also just a genuinely awesome person, and I hope I can somewhat follow in his footsteps as far as the path he took during his 5 years here.
We also have LT Higgins, who is the senior instructor (SI) for the division and has been at the base even longer than Waterman (at the time of me writing this, in fact, his 5 years came to a close and he has already transferred to an HR position in Guam!) The senior instructor is a position where someone who has a few years of teaching under his belt helps teach others the essentials for teaching a class. The position is especially important in first-half divisions, since that is where the people who have never taught before learn in the first place! After LT Higgins left, LTGJ Vazquez took his place as the SI of the division. The SI is also generally in charge of making sure the future instructors are keeping up with their qualifications.
Next up is the Section Leading Petty Officer, or SLPO, who is Chief Gilbert (but we all just call him chief). He is there to make sure there is someone with a good amount of fleet and sea experience available to answer any questions we might have about the military aspect of what we teach or the applications of what we are learning to the plant itself. Chief is an awesome addition to the division, and has a great sense of humor. It is such a good idea to have someone experienced like him in the division! Plus, he is a fantastic cook which I found out from spending Thanksgiving at his house as well as the grading day potlucks we have during exams.
The other major roles in the division are Track Coordinator, who figures out who is teaching what section and manages the schedules for the classes coming through, and Exam Security Coordinator (ESC) who makes any exam revisions necessary as well as managing security for the exams. Exam security is taken extremely seriously at the school, since that is essentially the sole way that we are determining if someone is qualified to literally man a nuclear reactor. At least in this building. There is another training they go to between graduating NPS and getting to the fleet, but nevertheless, exams are a really big deal. ESC tracks the exams from their development, oversees their printing, oversees their distribution and collection and grading, and then oversees the destruction of the exams once the grades and regrades are completed. ENS Hark is both the Track Coordinator and the secondary ESC, and I actually just recently got qualified to take over as primary ESC for the division. But I am getting ahead of myself.
Also in the division is ENS McKinney, the local math nerd we turn to with the really difficult questions; ENS Fite, the most outgoing of the division whose confidence and smile brings up the whole group; ENS Nguyen, the record-breaking teacher who can take any class and bring them to the top; ENS Larson, the narcissistic jazz-lover with an obsession with the Hammond organ; ENS Weber, whose shy demeanor and constant optimism are welcome in any situation; and ENS Ritter, the one I met in Officer school who lives just down the road from me. In addition, a few future instructors are now in the division, but time enough to talk about them in future posts.
Looking Ahead
Once I had those few first-day tasks completed, I got a look at what my life would be like for the next few months. Basically, I was given a qualifications folder with a lot of pages in there with lines for signatures to be written, and I needed to go “catch them all” and fill in every blank line with a signature from the corresponding person. What I had to do to get those signatures will be the topic of a future post!
Thank you all for reading, and I hope to not have such a large gap in my posting again. No promises, but here’s hoping!
Peace,
Christopher