Noaa Interview Questions: Fill & Download for Free

I consider myself to have been very fortunate to have over a decade long career as a NOAA Corps Officer, resigning my commission as a LCDR in 2014. Had it not been for the birth of my son and resulting change in my life priorities, I would have gladly retired after a 20–30 year career, but the prolonged family separation and frequent relocations were not aspects that my wife was thrilled with. I got to do a lot of things that I never would have otherwise and it proved to be a very rewarding career choice.The NOAA Corps is not well known, so every officer should have a 30-second ‘elevator speech’ about what the Corps is and what we do. My ‘elevator speech’ went: “The NOAA Corps is the smallest of the nations 7 uniformed services with about 320-commissioned officers that primarily operate NOAA’s fleet of ships and aircraft and also serve in leadership, administrative, operational, and technical roles throughout the organization.”During my career I worked primarily under NOAA’s Office of Coast Survey (OCS) making nautical charts for navigation, but we did have officers that worked in fisheries, oceanography, meteorology, and ocean exploration. The Corps has its history through the USC&GS (US Coast and Geodedic Survey) and my, admittedly biased, opinion is that OCS is the most rewarding career path for an officer and also where the NOAA Corps serves the most useful role. So, with that caveat in mind, here are my answers to your individual questions, in a slightly modified order:How is the training? NOAA is a direct commissioning program and targets college graduates with engineering, science, or math degrees. You will swear in and then begin your Basic Officer Training Course (BOTC). I was recruited out of the Colorado School of Mines with a Mechanical Engineering degree and most of my BOTC classmates were from similar backgrounds, but a few were more experienced and coming from careers later in life looking for a career with more excitement. When I went through BOTC, it was held in Kings Point, NY at the US Merchant Marine Academy; military bearing was not emphasized and a majority of our time was spent learning to drive ships and getting our STCW qualifications. Now, however, the BOTC program has moved to the USCG Academy and parallels their OCS program with an additional month of ship driving training at MSI (Marine Simulation Institute) in Newport, RI.Do you only work with other corps members or civilians too? The NOAA Corps only has 321 commissioned officers, while NOAA has over 10,000 civilian employees. A majority of your career is spent working primarily with civilians. On the ships the crew (Deck, Engineering, Stewards, and Survey Departments) are all Wage Mariners, which are the same as civilian crews of Military Sea-lift Command. The rest of NOAA’s staff are standard GS or equivalent employees; in both my shore assignments my immediate supervisors were civilians.Where do you work? NOAA has offices around the country and some very remote locations. One of the interview questions that I always asked officer candidates was, “do you have a problem serving in any geographic location?” I would then emphasize the ANY geographic location by pointing out the NOAA Corps billet as station chief for the South Pole. I had a somewhat unusual career in that I spent 7 years in the Seattle area and 4 years in Rhode Island, but usually officers can expect to be relocated every 2–3 years. For a full list of places that NOAA Corps Officers can be assigned, you can look over the Billet List.How long are you away from home? During my sea assignments the longest I have been away from home port is 7-months, which was on my first year on the ship, but there are other ships that have been years between returning to their home ports and some (due to facility or logistic issues) that virtually never go to their home ports. The NOAA Ship Ron Brown cruises around the world and is very rarely in their home port. The NOAA Ship Fairweather is unable to dock in her home port (Ketchikan, AK) because the NOAA pier there has been condemned and there is no other option for long term moorage. Being in your home port does not necessarily mean that you will have much time in port or at home; often that just means a couple days in port between legs. You can also look at days at sea (DAS) as an indicator for time away from home. My first year we had 215-DAS, but that has been reduced to around 180-DAS annually due to budget cuts.What is a “day in the life”? This one varies substantially between officers. As a generalization, aboard ship you can expect to stand a 4-on/8-off watch cycle and on a shore assignment you would be working in more of a 9–5 type job environment. I can’t speak to pilot’s life, but I hear it’s pretty sweet and filled with Marriotts and bonus pay. I can give you my experiences over my past assignments:My last assignment was as the Navigation Manager for the Northeast Region for OCS. I liked to joke that I was a professional meeting attender, running from the Port of New York/New Jersey, the second largest port in the US, and all ports north to Eastport, Maine. As Navigation Manager, I served as the primary contact for NOAA’s Office of Coast Survey and had the opportunity of working closely with the pilots associations, the United States Coast Guard, Port Authorities, and other agencies and port operators. During my time in this position, I had the unfortunate privilege to be an integral part of the response efforts to Hurricane Irene and Post-Tropical Cyclone Sandy. While I hope never to repeat such an event, it is something that I look back on proudly. I worked closely with the USCG, USACE, and other port partners in the Marine Transportation System Recovery Unit, and cannot sing their praises loudly enough. I even wrote a white paper on it. Aside from those few emergency response operations, this was essentially an office job with a lot of travel.I previously served in the position of Ocean Engineer with the PMEL Engineering Development Division in Seattle, Washington. At PMEL, I had the opportunity to serve as a project manager; overseeing design, prototyping, testing, manufacture, and implementation of several mooring and instrument systems. This included work on the Deep-ocean Assessment and Reporting of Tsunami (DART) buoys, a new generation Easy-to-Deploy (ETD) data buoy platform, and the Aerosol Laboratory Unmanned Aerial System. A typical day here was going into the office around 7am and working on designs in a CAD with a few opportunities to play in the machine shop or do some testing and then head home at around 5pm. I did have a few chances to go out on buoy deployment/recovery cruises, once on a NOAA ship and once on the JAMSTEC vessel Mirai.I had two sea tours aboard the NOAA Ship Rainier, a 231-ft hydrographic (I will be abbreviating this hydro) survey ship working throughout the waters of the Northwest and Alaska. I also had the opportunity to sail on oceanographic and fisheries ships as an augmenting officer when they were short staffed. On those ships JOs (junior officers) would do their two 4-hour watches and spend a few extra hours doing collateral duties like correcting nautical charts, managing the ships imprest fund (petty cash), organizing ship’s moral events, maintain damage control plans, etc. On a hydro ship your collateral duties included conducting survey operations in addition to all the standard collateral duties; it’s this cross over that I think makes officers on hydro so valuable, the experience gained in navigating the ship on the bridge carries over to acquisitions and data processing for the nautical chart.On my first sea tour, I was quickly introduced to the world of hydrographic survey and managed my first survey sheet (under the tutelage of an experienced sheet manager) on the ship’s first cruise. Rainier and her sister ship, Fairweather, are somewhat unique in the NOAA fleet in that they will transit to the working grounds and anchor, running the majority of our survey operations with survey launches and small boats. We would stand watch on the way to the working area, but once there we would shift to anchor watches and the majority of the crew would move to more of a day work schedule. Launches would be dropped promptly at 8am, they would acquire data until 4pm when we would pick the launches and the data would get preliminary processing that evening and sheet managers would plan acquisition for the following day. After 2–3 weeks we would head into a nearby port for a weekend and then do the whole thing over again until the project area surveys were completed.My most recently tour was as Field Operations Officer (FOO). As FOO, I was responsible for managing operations of the ship’s six 30-ft hydrographic survey launches and two small boats to acquire near shore hydrographic survey data. Being third in command and with a wardroom of 13-officers, I did not have to stand a navigation watch, but was kept busy with survey planning, data processing issues, troubleshooting survey equipment, etc. On average I probably worked every hour of the day that I wasn’t sleeping (16–18 hour days were kind of the norm), but being a hydro FOO, especially on a large multi-platform vessel like Rainier, is probably one of the most demanding jobs in the Corps.All that being said, officer’s career paths and experiences are extremely varied and your career is what you make it, particularly on the shore side. You can always watch the recruiting video (I make a brief appearance with a UAS):

He starts criticizing the questioner OR he says “I don't know”Examples:Reporter: “If you did not draw on the NOAA hurricane map, then who did?”Trump: “I don't know.”Trump asked National Security Adviser, John Bolton, to eliminate the National Security Council’s global health security unit and demote its pandemic experts in May, 2018. Asked on March 13 about the decision to shut down the unit, Trump said, “I didn’t do it. I don’t know anything about it.Asian Reporter (29 March covid19 briefing): [asking the questionfor the second time]: “What are you doing to stop hate crimes against Asians?”Trump: “I don't know” then he walked back into the White House summarily ending the briefing.20 March - NBC News White House correspondent Peter Alexander asked whether perhaps Trump’s tendency to put a positive spin on the situation might be giving Americans a false sense of security, and what the president would say to Americans watching right now who are scared.Trump lashed out at Alexander. “I say that you are a terrible reporter,” the president said. “That’s what I say. I think that’s a very nasty question, and I think it’s a very bad signal that you’re putting out to the American people.”During an interview with 60 Minutes Leslie Stahl, Trump replied to a difficult question “Im the president and you're not.”30 March White House covid19 briefing:REPORTER: “WHAT DO YOU SAY TO AMERICANS WHO ARE UPSET WITH YOU OVER THE WAY YOU DOWN PLAYED THIS CRISIS OVER THE LAST COUPLE OF MONTHS? “WE HAVE IT VERY MUCH UNDER CONTROL IN THIS COUNTRY” “THE CORONAVIRUS IS VERY MUCH UNDER CONTROL IN THE U.S.A.” “IT'S GOING TO DISAPPEAR”. “IT'S LIKE A MIRACLE. IT WILL DISAPPEAR.” MARCH 4, “WE HAVE A VERY SMALL NUMBER OF PEOPLE IN THIS COUNTRY INFECTED”. MARCH 10, “WE'RE PREPARED, WE'RE DOING A GREAT JOB WITH IT. IT WILL GO AWAY. JUST STAY CALM. IT WILL GO AWAY”.WHAT DO YOU SAY TO AMERICANS -- …WHO THOUGHT YOU GOT THIS WRONG?”TRUMP: “I DO WANT THEM TO STAY CALM AND WE ARE DOING A GREAT JOB. …..Blah blah blah …INSTEAD OF ASKING A NASTY, SNARKY QUESTION LIKE THAT, YOU SHOULD ASK A REAL QUESTION …

You’ve read about Trump’s mental issues and stupidity here. I’ll add one more: laziness.Trump is a lazy SOB. This is Trump at the 2017 Taormina, Sicily G7 conference. While the other foreign leaders walked the short 700 yards to take the traditional group photo at a nearby piazza, Trump waited behind for his chauffeured golf cart. And yet Hillary was the one with “no stamina”.Based on the comments of his contemporaries, teachers and others who grew up with him, Trump doesn’t like to do the work. We see it with his presidential schedule and its hours and hours of “executive time”. According to White House insiders that’s when Trump watches TV and talks on the phone with his friends at Foxnews. The man couldn’t even be bothered to cross the bridge to attend traditional Memorial Day ceremonies at Arlington this year. He was “busy with phone calls”. Dood, that’s why you have four secretaries and a staff of assistants: to schedule things like phone calls around your official duties. What are we paying them, and you, for?I’m getting to my answer, promise. But first, reports from inside Trump Organization were that Trump was mostly a figurehead CEO who showed up at the office to do interviews and for photo ops and to bark nebulous orders to his staff. Kudos go to his underlings for keeping the wheels on the wagon. But then again, he inherited them along with the company from his father too.I think Trump’s innate laziness caused him to refer to a 48 hour old weather forecast, which he probably saw on Fox & Friends, for a storm that was still a thousand miles away. He could have asked a staffer to get the latest hurricane forecast from his own agency before making a fool of himself but he just didn’t seem to care.The truth has always been a burden that Trump doesn’t want to carry. It’s so much easier to just make things up on the spot and lie about it later. That way you don’t have to do the work of learning, understanding and remembering the truth. He loves the accolades of being the Big Cheese, he just can’t be bothered to do the work of one.The bigger question is, why was Trump even forecasting a hurricane? That’s not a presidential duty. It’s why we have the National Weather Service and NOAA. On the rare occasions of a very dangerous storm where the president wants to put the weight of his office behind a warning to citizens to evacuate he always shares the podium with meteorological, FEMA and civil defense officials who give the details.Easy one: because in addition to being lazy, he doesn’t like sharing the stage. He wants to be the sole center of attention.