Life on a ship

shamablama · 02-17-2014, 11:37 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Nasant

My intention is to address the fact that everyone keeps bringing up suicide.

It's not that the program/pipeline causes people to become suicidal. It's that the program is only available to a certain type of people (Those who have high scores) and those are the kind of people that are generally more introverted, socially awkward, depressive, and prone to suicidal tendencies. You can disagree with me if you'd like, but I am in the pipeline. 99% of the people here are genuinely happy. True, the workload can be tough and the days can be long, but there is a sense of community here like nowhere else. When we pass a hard test we go out and celebrate. If a shipmate is struggling with some aspect of the schooling, we will all get together to help them. There are so many opportunities to relax and have fun here and in the fleet that those who don't take advantage are only harming themselves.

I hate the negative stigma that those few people who do decide to do something drastic like end their lives brings to the program. There are 3000+ students on base at any given time, and one or two people killing themselves is not indicative of the program (statistically), but more so of their individual personality types.

What you don't hear is that the people who go to these extremes tends to be those who have been masted or punished and are depressed about that, not "overwhelmed by the stress of the program". Just saying.

So my advice to any of those thinking about going in to the nuclear field is to not let the actions of a few troubled people dissuade you from a good opportunity. If it interests you, look more in to it. If it doesn't interest you, do something else. But don't let these 'horror stories' be the thing that turns you off of the program.

Thank you for posting this. I'm going AC and have heard so many things about how stressful the job is, and how people commit suicide because they can't handle it. It honestly scared me at first to the point where I wanted to switch rates. But my recruiter got in touch with a couple AC's he knew and I got to sit down one on one with them, and that made me really excited to do this rate.