What’s up, guys? It’s your boy Nick here, and I’m here to tell you a little bit about my experience with meps and taking the AsVAB. So, for all of you that don’t know, meps stands for military entry processing station. It’s the location you go to take the ASVAB to see what jobs you qualify for and to get your physical done, to see if you are in the right shape and health to join the military. So I’ve always been thinking about joining the military and wondered what jobs I could get.
So I went down to my local recruiter and I got signed up for the ASVAB. He gave me a date that was about a week and a half out. He told me that he was really looking for good mechanical scores and electrical scores, and if I just scored high in that category, he would work with me, even though I did not want that job at all, did not want to be in mechanical or electrical. I wanted jobs that were in the general field, like the intelligence field, and all of that which go by the general category of the ASVAB test. I went down to the library.
Anyway. I got the ASVAB for Dummies book. It’s a really good book. It has about four practice tests in it. It has all the sections that are going to be on the ASVAB in it.
It pretty much gives you all these practice questions and gets you in the right mindset of answering the same type of questions that are going to be on the AsFAb. They’re not going to be same exact questions, but they’re going to be similar to get you in the right thought process and pretty much teach you the right ways of solving the problems that you’re going to be seeing on the AsVAb. Just different numbers, letters, different vocab words and all of that. So I had about a week and a half to study, and then I showed up at meps. When I first got to meps, you have to go through security, you have to take your belt off, hat off, shoes off, go in there, and then you turn the corner, and there’s a couple of ladies there, a couple of men there that tell you, take your phone out of your pocket, put it in a vanilla envelope, and put it in a cubby and go sit down.
So then they start calling you up. They make you give them your recruiter’s paperwork that the recruiter sent you there with. So then they know your name and all your information. They make you put your finger on a little fingerprint scanner that is going to be used as your way of signing documents from that point forward. They don’t make you take out a pen, sign all your name, do all that.
They make you scan your finger to sign documents. So the process goes faster because they got hundreds of kids going throughout these locations every day. So they make you sit down, then they call you up. So, for instance, my experience, they called up, Nicholas, where are you at? I said, I’m right here.
They said, come here, nicholas. They said, are you here to pick the asvab? I said, yeah. They said, it’s not yes, yes, ma’am. Don’t ever say yeah again.
I am not your friend. Go stand on the wall. And I was like, all right. And at this point, I’m still a civilian. I’m like, what is going on here?
It’s like they’re yelling at kids. They’re making kids do this and that. They’re treating you as if. Like you’re in boot camp. They’re trying to scare you, I guess.
There’s kids there shaking, nervous that they’re taking this test. They’re nervous they’re failing their physicals, all this and that. So they get you to this room. They bring you to a room that has like 40, 50 computers in it. You line up against wall.
They tell you, all right, when I tell you, you could sit down at a computer and type all your information in, you sit down at the computer, type your information in. There’s these dividers in between each computer that pretty much so you can’t look at the other person’s computer screen. Not that it matters, because it’s not the same questions, not the same information. You’re all going for different branches. And some people have 50 questions, some have 30.
It’s all different categories. Well, different orders for the most part. So this room is extremely cold. My recruiter told me, make sure you bring a jacket. It’s going to be extremely cold in there.
People are freezing. You get in there, it’s about 60 degrees. I, for one, wore a jacket, so I was perfectly fine in that part. But then this test, I would say this test takes anywhere from an hour and a half to two and a half hours, on average, based on how fast you take the test, how fast of a test taker you really are. And it composed of reading, mathematics knowledge, arithmetic, reasoning, paragraph comprehension, assembling objects, mechanical, electrical, all of that stuff.
So after I was finally done taking all the sections, this personality test pops up. That is about 100 questions long. And it’s just ridiculous. It tells you to choose the mostly correct answer for you and it will list two horrible things, like, I hate all religions or I was a horrible kid in high school and both of them are not true, but it wants you to choose which one is most like you, and I’m guessing which one is, well, you would go for which one is less bad, because you don’t want to say you hate all religions, but then you don’t want to say you were bad in high school, but you have to choose one. There’s no other option.
So that’s the type of personality test they give you. It takes about 20, 30 minutes, it’s about 100 or so questions. And then after that, you take this cyber test. I don’t know if this is for other branches, but for the air force, they make you take a cyber test, see if you’re good on computers. I, for one, I think I did fairly well on that.
I knew more of that than what to put on that personality test. After that, they immediately have your test scores ready before the personality test or the cyber tests even start. They have your test scores in the envelope, so when you’re on your way out, they hang you it on the envelope. It says, do not open until you’re at a recruiter. But based on what recruiter you have, I guess it doesn’t really matter if you open it or not.
Some of them want you to take a photo, send it in, or they want you to wait and bring it to them so you can find out your test scores together. So you get your test scores back immediately, so you know what you’re going to score, you know how it’s going to be, and you really just want to get a lot of sleep the night before, eat a light breakfast, wear a jacket. And my advice is to definitely study. You don’t need too much studying because you’re not going to know the questions that are on there. You’re just going to have an idea of how the questions are going to be and how they’re going to look like, how to solve them, but it’s not going to be identical questions.
Honestly, the week and a half of studying, I don’t think very helped me that much at all. I didn’t even have to study to go in for that, but I wanted to be confident at least a little bit, so that’s why I did. But if you’re going to study, I would recommend not studying for one and a half weeks like I did. Study for, like, one and a half months, two months. You’ll secure a pretty good score.
I, for one, got a 74 on the test. That’s good enough because the highest score that I’ve seen for the Air Force in the intelligence field and in any categories that I was looking up that was enlisted and not for an officer or someone going in with some type of college degree was the highest score needed was a 72. So by me getting a 74, that secured me for many jobs. I actually did go to the mechanical and electrical section because the recruiter told me to do good in that section, so that way he would work with me. I did very well in those sections somehow.
So I guess the studying did pay off for that week and a half because I had absolutely no knowledge in mechanical or electrical besides the very little bit I knew about computers. And I ended up doing very well in those sections, scoring pretty high to get a lot of electrical and mechanical jobs. But I ended up choosing the intelligence jobs and the ones in the general category for the air force. So, to sum up, the ASVAB, they’re extremely important to study, I would say, but you don’t have to. You just want to get a good night’s sleep.
You want to eat in the morning and go in there. Confidence. Definitely. Say, yes, ma’am. Yes, sir.
They will yell at you like they did me, and they yelled at a bunch of kids. So it wasn’t just me, but just don’t be nervous. Go in there, give it your best shot. And I believe you do get to take the AsVAb test score again if you are going for the air force. But if you are going for the army and you do score high enough for a job, I do not believe they will let you take the test again for at least six months to a year.
That’s just some thought. But ask your recruiter and.