What’s it like attending college full-time while in the Army Reserves or National Guard?

Being in college and in the reserves is pretty easy. Here are two important rules :

1). Don’t take Saturday classes. Maybe you can, but communicate with your supervisor/NCO. When I have people constantly missing Saturdays, they fall behind in training, medical and fitness requirements, and in unit cohesion. It’s painful as a SNCO running my unit and that member will share in some pain too if it persists.

2). This should really be #1. Communicate communicate communicate with your supervison/NCOs. Most 2 week annual trainings are in the summer. Try to go to longer military schools in the summer. You can be slick, you can take a college class all July, then get activated for 2 weeks in August, and then start school in September and make UTA weekends. Obviously, don’t take that July class if your unit is on active duty in July.

Communicate with your leadership often and and early as possible and you will be fine.

I was. I have an AA and a BA, and they were both completed while in the reserves...

CMSgt (Join to see) provided a lot of good advice, and I'll add my personal experience.

For me being a reservist, I'll say it's been challenging. I switched from active duty to reserves and went straight into community college. I will start this by saying I'm not trying to rant and I think it's just my unit. However, when I arrived at my unit there were rumors, later to be confirmed that we'd be going on the unit's first deployment since WW2. Already having 2 deployments under my belt as an infantryman I didn't care too much, but my CDR pulled me to the side and asked me to waive my 2 years of deployment stability or whatever it's called. The first problem I ran into was trying to get reclassed before deployment while having minimal impact of civilian schooling. Despite my best efforts every summer course for MOS reclass was never submitted by my old training NCO. Finally I had to take off a semester to reclass. Got reclassed a month before we mobilized, obviously no time for ALC.

Fast forward to now, I'm chasing ALC. I will admit that covid definitely has its role to play with ALC but I've been trying to secure an class date since and just now might be getting one in a few months. Problem is, me and the current training NCO are trying our best to secure any class so I can promote, but also one that won't impact college as much.

Again. Not trying to bitch or complain, I get military requirements but I just wanted to say it's not as easy as recruiters make it seem to go to college full time and serving in the reserves. Like CMSgt (Join to see) said, communication is key with your leadership. Because of covid I'm taking a summer course online and don't expect much impact due to our upcoming training schedule. Lastly, I'm using the post 9-11, but depending on what program you're going for, other forms of financial assistance may be best such as TA, FASFA, ETC.

I’m an Army Reservist and just finished my first semester of college. I took 16 credits, had a part time job, the Reserve, and still managed to achieve a 4.0. Most E-4 and below in my Reserve unit are full time college students. Also, I go to CC and unfortunately my school isn’t covered by TA, so I paid out of pocket.