So originally I was going to go to art school in Colorado, but it was really expensive. I didn’t know that much about the GI bill or, like, specific branches of the military at the time. My wife, at one point in her life, was going to join the Air Force reserves. And then I also grew up next to Buckley Air Force Base. So all three of those things kind of equated out to me joining the Air Force, like finding this YouTube channel, finding other YouTube channels, and just getting as informed as I can.
And it just led me down that path of, this is probably the best branch for me and the best thing for me in this season of my life, for job security and then focusing on other things outside of the Air Force to set up a good future.
I’ve been in the Air Force for two and a half years now. I joined February 2017, and I’m an a one c.
So my job is cybersystems operations. The AFSC is three do x two.
I got this job in depth. I waited about maybe a month or two for the contract.
This was the second job on my pick ten list or whatever, and this ended up being the job that I wanted to do, because after I was already in, my number one pick was cybersurity, and I actually saw what they did, and I liked this job a lot better. So I guess you could say that I did get my number one job.
So cybersecurity, like I just said, was my number one pick, but that’s because my recruiter wouldn’t let me put the actual jobs that I wanted to do on there. He said that they just weren’t really getting people and getting contracts for those right now, but I really wanted to do a graphic design job. I forgot what the AFSC actually was, but when I went to meps, they told me that they just dropped that. And so then my other number one was photojournalism, because I love photography and stuff like that. But that didn’t end up working out either, because he said I couldn’t go that route.
I also had some medical stuff on there, like dental and some other things. It isn’t something that I wanted to do, but it’s something I ended up being kind of used to. And so it’s kind of the direction that I went.
I signed a four year contract. Six years was a really big commitment, and I wasn’t ready to do that.
Tech school for Cyberops is at Keysler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Mississippi.
Tech school is basically four months, unless it’s changed, which I don’t think that it has, but it’s basically four months long. So from basic through tech school, it’s pretty much just a six month process.
Tech school was amazing. Keesler Air Force Base has the best defects in the air force. So we talk about it all the time at work, just kind of looking back at it, and it’s not so fun when you’re there. But since you’re all there together with people who are kind of a lot like you, it’s easy to make a lot of friends and you just kind of go through the same things together. And so you have pretty much anybody and everybody to talk about it with.
But all not was a really good time. It’s just kind of something you have to experience alone. Tech school in Mississippi is super humid because it’s like right in the gulf. So once you get past that and stuff, it’s really not that big of a deal. The ocean is cool.
It’s like a manmade ocean. It’s not super bad. There’s a lot of fun stuff to do around there, too. So all in all, it was like an eight out of ten. I’d give it an eight out of ten.
So with cyber ops, you can pretty much go anywhere in the Air Force. And I think you can also go places like to other army bases and stuff like that. It’s a really versatile job. You can pretty much end up doing in this it, like cyber career field in the Air force. With this job specifically, we’re system administrators, but sometimes you get pulled to do other things as well.
So the job goes literally anywhere.
So there’s two main things for cyber ops, and these are kind of the two main things you learn at tech school. I would say you learn a lot about cybersecurity, which takes you into SeC plus, which is a cert by comptia that you end up getting to graduate tech school. So you learn a ton of stuff about vulnerabilities, getting hacked, viruses and stuff like that. And then the other side of things is system administration. So if you don’t know what that is, it’s like server administration.
Keeping websites up and running, keeping applications up and running. Pretty much anything that you’re accessing online is on a server. And so we have to keep those alive so that people can continue to access them from other remote locations. Our job starts with like, it’s kind of like a nine to five. So we show up at work at 07:00.
We go home at 04:00. Monday, Wednesday and Friday is PT. So we show up at 07:00 do PT for 30 minutes to 45 minutes. And then we go home, change, shower, and we come back to work at like 09:00 and then it’s from nine to four. Our job is really general, so you can end up doing pretty much anything, like I said before, but that’s like the bare minimum of that job.
It’s a pretty cool job. You do a lot with virtual machines, which are computers. There’s a ton of computers on one computer. You would have to look it up. It’s kind of complicated, but yeah, that’s pretty much what we do.
So if a new airman showed up in our shop, the first thing I would tell them is that they should get their cdcs done as fast as possible. That’s like a really big thing that leadership wants new airmen to get done. So once you get those done, you can kind of move on to on the job training and you can actually get hands on with servers and with your job that you’re doing on your base, whatever it is. That’s probably the biggest thing because CDCs really take up a lot of time and they’ll put you to sleep. They’ll put you to sleep pretty quick, too.
So the sooner you get them done, the sooner you can actually do your job on a day to day basis. And that’s when the air force kind of turns into the air force and you really break away from that training, tech school BMT mindset. Another thing is that there are a lot of negative people in the air force. So the first thing I would say is, don’t be one of those negative people. And the second thing I’d say is just kind of take it one day at a time.
Maybe don’t go in. If you want to do a career, that’s awesome. But go in with the mindset that anything is possible and that there could be new opportunities, doors opening and doors closing everywhere. So just be as optimistic as possible and then just don’t let people drag you down. That’s like the best advice that I can give.
So I make Air Force videos as well. My YouTube channel name is Skatenarly. That’s Skagnarley. My title for channel is Jonathan Sullivan. I don’t really go by Skate gnarly anymore.
My Instagram and my Twitter are exactly the same. So make sure you go check me out on there and subscribe to my YouTube channel.