Wednesday, August 14, 2013

ACAP All Day - (MedBoard: Joint Base Lewis-McChord) Day 67

This morning's formation we were all told to wear summer PTs with the jacket and everyone seemed to get the message…except our 1st sergeant. As soon as she came out, she told everyone to remove their jackets. I gotta say this army stuff is getting pretty old. I hate dealing with big egos and no common sense. I just have to remind myself that my time is short…my time is short.

After accountability, we were told that there was 100% weigh in this morning. I then hear a chief warrant officer behind our formation say "I'm not fucking doing that", then he proceeded to walk off. I guess when you're a chief, the rules don't apply. We all headed up to the bravo company offices and luckily those of us with appointments were allowed to go first. I headed up to the front of the line because I'm starting the 3 day mandatory ACAP classes, and they start at 0800. I find out I'm actually 4 pounds overweight, so I have to get taped to measure my body fat percentage. I pass pretty easily. I've always been heavier than I look since high school. I always wanted to be able to dunk the basketball, so I worked out quite a bit on my legs all the time. Muscle mass is quite a bit heavier than fat…although I have been noticing my stomach starting to grow a bit. I think my metabolism is starting to slow down a bit…I may have to slow down on the ice cream consumption.

I headed to the gym and changed into civilian clothes. We are allowed to wear civilian clothes for the ACAP classes, which is nice and a lot more comfortable. I drive over to north Ft. Lewis and then ate breakfast in my car before heading up to the classroom.

Today's focus for the ACAP class was basically emphasizing the use of "military talk" when speaking with employers. Those people transitioning out need to remember how to speak "civilian" both in person and on their resume. This will not be too hard for me, because I was a civilian a lot longer than I was in the military. In fact I never really acclimated to using very much military jargon. I felt that most of the time I was just a civilian in an army uniform. A lot of folks though have had the military as a large part of their professional life and it's going to take time to learn the translation from military language to normal civilian language.

We had an hour break for lunch, I headed to my car and ate while listening to the radio. When we arrived back in class it was a lot of the same talk about civilian language. The latter part of the day involved how to translate your MOS into positive wording for a resume. Instead of saying "I drive tanks", one might say they were in charge of operating a multimillion dollar piece of equipment for example. We were given a few informational websites to check out and then dismissed at about 1630 for the day.

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