The Unofficial SMART Scholarship Forum

I have just been told that in all likelihood my SF will not have a position available when I graduate after this semester. I know that at some point I will be made available to other SF but I am concerned over the timeline if that happens. Can anyone with experience or knowledge of a similar situation give me a rundown of what to expect?

Email your CA, and if they don't get back to you, call them. If you can't find the phone number, I can send it to you privately. They don't like the number to be out there generally, because they don't have the staffing to be consistently answering the phone, but if they don't get back to you, it's worth the inconvenience.

RF_EE wrote:Email your CA, and if they don't get back to you, call them. If you can't find the phone number, I can send it to you privately. They don't like the number to be out there generally, because they don't have the staffing to be consistently answering the phone, but if they don't get back to you, it's worth the inconvenience.

I have emailed my CA. If they don't get back with me in a timely manner I will PM you for the number. Thanks!

No problem whatsoever - I'm interested to hear what they do for you. Did you do an internship for your SF, and would you consider transferring to a different SF?

RF_EE wrote:No problem whatsoever - I'm interested to hear what they do for you. Did you do an internship for your SF, and would you consider transferring to a different SF?

Yes I did an internship at my SF last summer. I am pursuing a masters so I only had one internship period. My current sponsor would not require me to move and could have been a long term fit for me. Anywhere else will probably mean I would just suck it up and work out my time. Paying back all the benefits isn't an option for me.

My only suggestion is to start taking everything in writing. Be prepared to go to court. SMART will do their best to get you onboard somewhere, but if they fail, they will try and pin it on you (as they did to me).

I logged every phone call with SMART, every letter from from SF, everything. Dates, times. I stopped communicating with my SF by phone. Only by email. If I didn't get timely responses, I'd contact by phone but ask them to respond to the email. I asked my SF to notify the SPO in writing of all their decisions, and CC me on those communications (so I was aware of what the SPO knew, and when).

There came a time, about a month before graduation, the service liaison tried to throw me under the bus. Claimed I had not submitted my list of alternate facilities in a timely manner. I forwarded her the email that I had sent her a month previous, 1 week after they had requested I give them a list of alternate facilities, and she stopped trying to pull one over on me.

It may work out for the best, and you'll have a job easy peasy (probably even at your SF location, but a different command/branch), but you should be prepared for the worst. The worst case being, SMART tries to eject you from the program and expects you to pay all your benefits back. Approach the problem that way, because if you need to get a lawyer in 6 months to a year from now, you need to be ready.

Wanted to keep this updated. At this point my SF has not officially filed the paperwork stating that they are unable to hire me. Because of this I am just stuck in a holding pattern waiting on them to decide where I will be working. At this point I am just stressed that I will have to move myself and my family in a short timeframe or risk having a period without pay between graduation and my work start date. Really not a pleasant situation. I wish stressing over my thesis was my biggest problem.

nojobnowwhat wrote:Wanted to keep this updated. At this point my SF has not officially filed the paperwork stating that they are unable to hire me. Because of this I am just stuck in a holding pattern waiting on them to decide where I will be working. At this point I am just stressed that I will have to move myself and my family in a short timeframe or risk having a period without pay between graduation and my work start date. Really not a pleasant situation. I wish stressing over my thesis was my biggest problem.

This is another issue you should be talking with your CA about. One of the guys at my SF went through a 6mo waiting period with SMART and his SF to get hired due to a couple of issues with his conversion to full time employee. SMART actually continued to pay him his stipend for the full 6mo, and although it was technically "based on the availability of funds", he received it each and every month.

SMART Scholarship has billets that your sponsoring facility can use to hire you. I am in phase II right now, but initially had issues getting hired because my department had no extra billets. When the scholarship gave a billet to my department, that did not count towards the total number of billets my department had, they were eager to hire me. Also, some calls from OSD to the sponsoring facility quickly cleared things up. This was all the doing of the SMART scholarship by the way. I suggest asking your POC at the SMART scholarship about these options. By the way, your position will be excepted service, and does not require posting on USA jobs.

hmmmm wrote:SMART Scholarship has billets that your sponsoring facility can use to hire you. I am in phase II right now, but initially had issues getting hired because my department had no extra billets. When the scholarship gave a billet to my department, that did not count towards the total number of billets my department had, they were eager to hire me. Also, some calls from OSD to the sponsoring facility quickly cleared things up. This was all the doing of the SMART scholarship by the way. I suggest asking your POC at the SMART scholarship about these options. By the way, your position will be excepted service, and does not require posting on USA jobs.

Unfortunately, a common issue affecting many smart scholars is that the DoD does not have a DoD-wide policy for SMART students.

Chains of command interpret rules differently and apply their own judgements and desires to those under their command. This happens throughout the DoD.

While you might be lucky to have found yourself in a command that listened to OSD and did not count your "billet" against the department's total "billets", that's not going to be exactly true for every command within the DoD.

Unfortunately, all it takes is a commander to choose to count SMART hires against department staffing numbers and you suddenly have an instance where the SF cannot hire you. OSD cannot dictate to a base commander every detail of running his base.