Electronics Technician

Being a nuclear engineer in the Navy is not an easy job. You have 2 years worth of college education crammed into 6 months twice. Then a year of “hands on” training at one of the prototypes. Its not uncommon to hear about suicides or people doing hard drugs because of the conditions. And that is just schooling. Once you get to your job out in the fleet, things get much, much worse. You don’t really get to understand or learn your job at your own pace because your seniors rush you to get your qualifications so you can take their place during watchstanding. You also have to worry about monthly tests or random subjects that you are given hour long presentations after nights with no sleep to learn new things that you will forget in a couple of days due to trying to learn other things. Most of the chain of command doesn’t actually care about their own sailors as long as the job gets done. Even our CO cared very little about the nuclear engineers. Our punishments for messing something up are way more severe than in any other jobs in the Navy. You also have to worry about ORSE, which is an inspection by a high ranking team of nuclear engineers, which will take the keys of the reactor away from the ship if you fail, which means we will work twice as hard because the CO will be upset that we failed him, which leads to more mistakes. Overall, would have never become a nuclear engineer and would have much rather been any other job in the navy.