You. So I joined the military to get out of a small town that I was from for my whole life. I was bouncing back and forth from basically dead end jobs just to make money. And I went to school for a few years, realized that what I was majoring in wasn’t really the path I wanted to take in life. I joined to hopefully get a career and get something with sustenance that I could pursue for the rest of my life.
Hopefully. Currently I’ve been in for right around three years and I’m an e four senior airman. The name of my job is a fusion analyst. At least that was when I joined. It might be called a sigma analyst or a signals intelligence analyst.
And the Afse shredout is one n four. So one n is intel and the four is the shred which is signals. I got the job by looking through the DEP job list that was listed and it was a high priority job that they wanted to fill. And I signed the contract in depth and it went from there. I got the job.
It was something that I wanted to do. I want to pursue a career in intelligence. From what I looked at online, I enjoyed the analytics side of it and I realized that it would take some brain power. And it wasn’t just a job where you could walk into it and be successful. It was something you had to really learn and constantly think every day at.
And that’s about all I knew going in, was that this job was something that requires a certain level of thought and every day it’s something new. I really didn’t want to do any other job. Mostly wanted to focus on the intel career set. As I said, I was looking to pursue a career, not really have something dead end. Not necessarily saying that most jobs in the air force are dead end, but there are some jobs that kind of put you into a corner when you get out of the military, because at some point everybody gets out of the military.
And I didn’t want that. I wanted something that I could take and use on the outside. This job comes with a six year contract. I believe it’s mandatory six year contract at least. When I joined, it was mostly because of the longer tech school and of course the clearance requirements.
So you have to qualify for a top secret clearance with this job. The tech school location is at Goodfellow Air Force Base, which is northwest of San Antonio. So you get on a bus and drive right into the desert and you’re pretty much in a little town in the desert for a decent amount of time. The average time is about six months that you’re there. It’s a pretty intensive course.
I enjoyed the tech school because, as I said, the tech school takes a lot of thought. It’s a fire hose of information, essentially, you really have to think on a different scale and think outside the box of what you’re used to. To learn this job and learn the essentials of what this job is. In terms of bases we could be stationed at, we are limited. It’s not a job where you could go everywhere in the entire world.
I believe it’s at 14 bases. It could be more, it could be less. But overseas locations are limited. So if you’re looking for overseas, you are limited to a couple overseas locations, and it’s possible the main bases are stateside. So my job, in a nutshell, is to be a secret level journalist, essentially.
There are a lot of different routes and avenues your career can take over the course of being a one in four. But right now I’m at the spot where I get out information to the war fighter, basically getting information where it needs to be higher scale level. So we put out information that can possibly be read by the president. We do a lot of briefings and look into things more in depth. From an intelligence point of view, it’s hard to talk about this job because it is classified, but it’s mostly analytic thought and thinking outside the box.
You need to be comfortable with speaking in front of people. You need to be comfortable with briefing. Getting used to being in a controlled environment, which is a skiff, that’s a secret compartmented information facility, which is a windowless building that you may spend upwards of twelve to 14 hours in. You will work many different schedules over the course of a short amount of time. Things change all the time in the world, and we are actively participating in that.
So you are almost always going to be on a different schedule. You need to be flexible, and you need to realize that what you’re doing has a greater purpose. If I had any advice to anyone who’s looking into this job or to someone new to this career field, I would say that you need to constantly be flexible and adaptable and realize that what you’re doing has a greater impact. And if you don’t know that greater impact, you need to look deeper and ask your ncos, and ask your senior ncos. And don’t be scared to put yourself out there to better yourself and of course, better others around you.
Because in the end, what you’re doing in this job is getting information to other people. So if you could articulate just like these videos do. If you could articulate information properly you can think analytically then you’ll be successful at this job. The other thing I would mention is that no matter what you’re not really going to know what this job entails until you sign that contract. You go to basic and you go to the tech school because as I said this job is classified.
You really need to go in with an open mind and join this job because you want to do it. If you’re not comfortable with that you need to look into another career field that has more defined skill sets or defined hands on work or something that isn’t as broad and open as the intel career field is. The different shredouts of intel they are mostly linked but you need to find something that pertains to you. So if you are looking for something that requires analytic thought and thinking outside the box and really using your brain every day this job will be right for you and you could succeed at.