Going to College in the Army

! Longer Version

Everything beyond the version above is merely optimization.

I'll start by explaining the pieces you need to get into motion.

* Get Permission from your Chain of Command
** Take this form: [Army Tuition Assistance Statement of Understanding (TA SOU)|http://panoptic.com/rking/file/up/Annual_TA_SOU.pdf] to your commander (which means give it to your immediate supervisor who will pass it up the chain).
** It is just an agreement where you sign saying you understand that you will pay if you fail for academic reasons, and your Commander is acknowledging that it will put an extra burden on you.
** Bring it to the Ed Center.
* You will need an account at [GoArmyEd|https://www.goarmyed.com/].
** This is a web site that the Army provides so that you can make the Army pay for your classes. It's a slightly painful process, starting right at the beginning how they make you choose a ridiculously complicated password and continuing on to how they make you confirm your address data all the time, and culminating with the horrid "Request TA" interface. You'll just have to dig into some of that "I will Never Quit" sensation.
** "Request TA and Enroll in Course", which is how you get money from the Army to your college, described in more detail below.
* Find a University. You have plenty of choices:
** 100% online
*** http://www.amu.apus.edu/ (My preference. Bonus is the )
*** http://www.phoenix.edu/ (I got my Associates from here, but I have a bad taste about them)
*** ...
** Brick-and-Mortar
*** Usually some local colleges will have a remote campus inside the Education Center. You can probably even find some hybrid classes, where you only go into class once in a while but otherwise the course is online.
** Big Colleges with Online Offerings
*** Penn State University and others: well-esteemed colleges that are starting to offer distance degrees.

That's pretty much it. The whole process can be done in an afternoon.

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Going to College in the Army