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Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

there are things that happen in one's life that dramatically impact the rest of one's life from that point forward. when i was in school looking at college, i very nearly became a submariner. as it happens, i was third in the list, but they only took the top two. at the time, it was devastatingly disappointing. these oh so many years later with hindsight and all that, i'm no longer disappointed. i can't see how the divergence in lifestyles could not be any wider. i do still love to read some Tom Clancy and similar Navy scifi

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I almost did the same thing in the US after graduating college. The signing bonus for nuclear power school was intriguingly large to me, and the job would have meant a steady source of income which I didn't have many prospects for at the time.

Thank god I did not do that.

That's what I was trying for as well, via Annapolis. I like to say that the reason I got third was during the interview process, I went all goofy and could not remember the element Uranium. I just couldn't do it. They were trying to get it out of me with taunting questions "is it carbon? is it plutonium?" "No, but relevant isotopes are 235 and 239". They did acknowledge that I wasn't trying to BS my way through as I had already answered plenty of other questions. My brain just went night night.

However, in all honesty, it was the fact that I screwed off my senior year in literature class and dropped my GPA which I'm guessing had a much larger factor. Now I'm glad I didn't read any of those boring high school assigned books. It saved me in the end

What did you end up selecting

i went to college for 3 semesters before dropping out because i couldn't afford it, and i didn't think going into debt with student loans was going to work. i took a part time job during the 2nd semester, and went full time hours during the summer. tried to schedule classes around work for the 3rd semester, but that didn't work well either. so i just decided to stop throwing money at school, and self-taught with a lot of OJT from some very cool engineers that seemed to enjoy some young kid appreciating their experience and knowledge.

tl;dr i got lucky

Me, too, the bonus must be just enough for them to fill the ranks. They must send that brochure to every graduating electrical engineer. One of my uncles did that in the 1970-80s and ended up working at a nuclear power plant for the rest of his civilian career. It's a living, though the number/location of civilian jobs in the USA probably is not great.

That was what I was being sold. Do 20 years in the service, then retire with a pension at the age of 38. Do another 20 years in a civilian role, then retire with a second pension before turning 60. I didn't buy it.

I worked at a defense contractor in my twenties and felt like a sucker cause all the managers in in their forties had full pensions.

That's what it comes down to in life though, right? What ever you choose, it will be wrong compared to someone else

To be fair all the guys retiring at 58 were finished doing exactly that.

I didn’t actually get to the point of applying but I also remember seriously considering that nuclear engineer offer back in college! It seemed like a sweet deal at the time.

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