Cryptologic linguist air force12/23/2023 I loved my job and the people I worked with and deployed with were my crew and my family. The other thing is the training pipeline to actually do your job is longer as well. There are more requirements and rules to be a flyer than to be a ground linguist. You have a head cold you have to go to the doctor for medication, no over the counter drugs and you're not flying until you go back to the doc to get cleared. The other thing to consider about flying is you are much more restricted medically. My longest flight was a little over 19 hours and that is just the time spent on the jet and doesn't take into account pre and post mission duties. You can also have some extremely long work days. If you are a flyer there are more training requirements you have to accomplish in order to do your job since it involves getting on an aircraft. The good and bad of being an airborne linguist is you can spend a lot of your time deploying depending upon your language and where you get stationed. I spent about 18 years of my career flying and I loved it. I retired 4 years ago to give you a reference point. I think that'd really help land a great job in Beijing or Shanghai.Former 1A8X1 here that started off her career as a ground linguist. What type of work are you doing? I hope to get up to Superior level to increase my chances of getting into the Wharton/Lauder program. like the 北京 '儿', or like how people from 杭州 and that area pronounce 'sh' like 's' and 'ch' like 'c'. I frequently have to remind people that I learned 标准普通话 and that I cannot understand their local dialect. (三) Accents as in dialects? Or do you mean tones? If you mean dialects, I'd say. I'd say you're at a huge advantage being there mostly because, IMO, conversational Chinese is much more difficult to master than the formal Chinese you hear on the news or read in the paper. You don't have to go into detail, but try to get the gist. Try to read the news in Chinese everyday. At the upper intermediate level, you should be able to handle almost all everyday situations (even if it feels clumsy). I took a 2 month immersion trip to Beijing while I was still in the Air Force and my OPI went from upper intermediate to advanced. (一和二) You are already doing the best thing possible. The best thing of the whole job though was simply the fact that I learned Chinese. I really miss that additional bit of current events information. Like state department economic reports or reports on Russian mafia involvement with European oil companies. The thing I liked most though: During downtime (which there was a shit ton of) I could just browse the classified web and read about really cool shit happening all over the world. It was tedious, but it was also a sort of satisfying positive feedback loop. Looking back though, I do miss sitting rack sometimes. It was cool as shit, but it served no purpose except to justify large budget increases. In the two years after it was built, the ONLY times I ever saw it being used was when we had some senator or general come visit. Several tens of millions of dollars this thing cost. When I was there they built this really cool 3-d holographic projection thingy that mapped and tracked asset movements. There was one really cool thing that our underground facility in Hawaii had. But it was also interesting to see how the intel machine works (and it is WAY less cool and WAY less advanced than depicted on tv and movies). It got quite tedious when just 'sitting rack,' which is what we call the watch floor jobs where we wear headphones and translate real-time voice communications. The job had high points and low points like any other. If I'd listed Spanish as first choice, they would've just said 'fuck you' and picked among those three for me. I scored a 147/150 on the Defense Language Aptitude Battery, so that pretty much meant I was either getting Chinese, Arabic, or Korean.
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