Passing the Academy (Enroute) 2019 Edition

[Termine]

do your best not to make the same mistakes again.

From my band teacher in high school: You can make as many mistakes as you want, as long as they're new mistakes...

 

[njeezy08]

Clean grading sheets are the biggest lie at the acadamy. I legit only had one the entire time. The last couple radar problems I ran were full sheets. Best advice I can think of is to read those and do your best not to make the same mistakes again.

This x100

Never understood why anyone would want to lie about something like that. Either that or they weren't being truthful with how much the instructor was prompting them on things during their problem

 

[vectorwagon]

This x100

Never understood why anyone would want to lie about something like that. Either that or they weren't being truthful with how much the instructor was prompting them on things during their problem

Or the person argued so much and was such a dbag know it all that the instructor basically quit caring. Not sure if they do that at the academy but they def do in real life, and I mean they are human/controllers still(albeit retired) so I can’t imagine they’d change all that much in retirement. I believe they genuinely want to help you but if somebody constantly argues and can’t be told anything then I would imagine they would just let you run your problem and not waste their breath trying to tell you anything since you already apparently know how to do it. “Clean grading sheet”. Of course in real life they’ll bring all those back up at the TRB and say no problems were documented so they get those hours back but that’s real life, not the Academy…

 

[OKbusyB]

Clean grading sheets are the biggest lie at the acadamy. I legit only had one the entire time. The last couple radar problems I ran were full sheets. Best advice I can think of is to read those and do your best not to make the same mistakes again.

I keep every sheet I had in a folder. I would just reread them every day. That and asking the instructors to let me run as much of the problem as possible helped me out the most.

 

[ClearanceClarence]

The individual mentioned on the last page was an interesting character, and really serves as a great example of behaviors to avoid at the Academy. Like Hyooz referenced, he had a very confrontational/argumentative attitude towards anyone who tried to help him (leads, row instructors, even fellow classmates at times). He constantly complained about how ‘stupid’ everything was and how none of the concepts were logical, etc. That may be true in some instances, but in OKC, you need to adopt the “sky is green” philosophy as our instructor put it. In other words, you are here to learn things the FAA’s way, so do so. Whether it makes sense or not, just prove that you can do as you are told and follow whatever rules they have established. Constantly complaining and arguing is never going to help, if anything, it will make instructors less willing to help you.

This individual also adopted a weird persona that was probably detrimental to himself in the end. Even though it was pretty clear from day one that he was not one of the strongest in the class, he loved to act like he knew his shit better than anyone. If you partnered up with him, he’d point out all your ‘mistakes’, even giggling when a you made an error. But then this was the same guy who would read phraseology off the paper on the wall during mid-teens non-radar problems. And he did indeed regularly lie about having clean sheets to everyone else. Maybe it made him feel better about himself, or maybe the whole thing was just a game to him. Who knows, but it ended up isolating him from a lot of the others. In the end, he went into evals with the lowest point count and washed after just 2 runs. Don’t let this be you be Oklahoma.