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Originally posted by rppearso:
I think you need to first emancipate yourself from your parents and apply for financial aid and make up the rest in student loans, it is very important to stay involved with very highly technical degrees like electrical engineering and physics (I am a chemical engineer working on my PE licence right now and going back for a physics masters later). If your 2 years in you have just finished up all of your math, basic physics and chemistry as well as a few 200 level disipline classes. Do NOT join the military until your degree is complete, in engineering you need everything you learned in your first two years in order to be successful in the second 2 years so if you waste time messing around with being enlisted (a pee on basicly) you taking a chance of getting rusty on the material you need, as you know engineering and science are not basket weaving degrees, you need to be able to focus and pass your classes and retain the information if your messing around with some yokle E-5 from indiana as an enlisted person it is going to disrupt your study and it will take forever to finish your degree (not to mention most schools will start recycling your credits after 7 years, they figure you need to revisit calculus if you havent taken it in over 7 years and they are probably right), if you can get some financial aid student loans are not that big of a deal it seems like alot now but 30-40K is really not much when you get a condo, a car and the other nice things associated with being an engineer and a professional but at the same time the best investment you can make. You can try joining the air national guard and they will pay for school and you only go one weekend a month but you still have to go through basic and AIT so you would likely have to take a semester off which in engineering equates to taking a year off unless you can fill that semester with electives (maybe some physics minor classes) your school might be different but some of my 300 and 400 level classes were only offered once a year so you dropped anything but your core classes because you did not want to be set back a year at least if you drop electives you are only there for an extra semester. When you finish your degree I would recommend going air guard OTS first and then going active if you like it, I was in the same mind set you are except I was trying to be a pilot and found out its easier to buy a high performance plane myself than play the militarys game, if I had done the air guard instead of the army guard I would probably still be in (asside from the fact that air gaurd are still exposed to deployment so I probably would have got out anyhow) with the air guard you go through one OTS training and are commissioned the army you have to attend basic and OCS which doubles your exposure to hazing. Alot of people on this site are hardliner enlisted with little to no education a few are officers but with the old school mentality and doubtfully have highly technical BS degrees in engineering or science (although I have met a few when I was in AFROTC (which is another option by the way) that were hardliners).