by ColoSMART » Sat Aug 01, 2020 9:33 pm
I was in the exact same situation as you in 2018 so I will walk through my thought process. First, I originally tried to apply for a "follow on award" to get my Masters degree funded through SMART. I originally only asked for 1 extra year, but SMART said their minimum award length is 1.5 years. At this point I did not want to extend my service commitment from 2 to 3.5 years. In order to make it all work out, I took a 7 month leave of absence from SMART from June to December, getting a private sector internship, and crammed a non-thesis MS into 1 extra semester. It took some planning on the front end to take online summer classes on my own dime during my internship, and take as many graduate classes as I could during my senior year while SMART was paying. My SF was on board, and the one extra semester ended up paying for itself since I could start as a GS-9 instead of a GS-7. Plus I got the private sector internship for additional experience if you can negotiate salary, and as a network connection for when you leave your SF.
I was in the exact same situation as you in 2018 so I will walk through my thought process. First, I originally tried to apply for a "follow on award" to get my Masters degree funded through SMART. I originally only asked for 1 extra year, but SMART said their minimum award length is 1.5 years. At this point I did not want to extend my service commitment from 2 to 3.5 years. In order to make it all work out, I took a 7 month leave of absence from SMART from June to December, getting a private sector internship, and crammed a non-thesis MS into 1 extra semester. It took some planning on the front end to take online summer classes on my own dime during my internship, and take as many graduate classes as I could during my senior year while SMART was paying. My SF was on board, and the one extra semester ended up paying for itself since I could start as a GS-9 instead of a GS-7. Plus I got the private sector internship for additional experience if you can negotiate salary, and as a network connection for when you leave your SF.