Friday, July 26, 2013

How to apply for Mycaa: A Simple womans breakdown

                                                                   


Hello military spouses! I'm just going to get right into it. Mycaa is a pain! At least trying to figure out how to
go about getting it and enrolling in school.  I know for maybe half a year to a year I have been asking off and on for help applying for this scholarship. The answers I usually got were contact your school adviser or just go to the website it will tell you.  While that's fine and dandy for some people that just doesn't work for me. Never has. I need steps, explanations before I start diving into things. I get too confused with how does it work? So maybe your like me and had the same experience. Well luckily I'm at the home stretch of enrolling in Career Step and thought I'd share my experience with you.

1) Alright first thing I did was to visit the education center on base to get the website and information I needed to apply for Mycaa. Well I got home and it didn't work! I use Google Chrome and it would not let me on. So I went back and had them get me onto the site. Really it's just your computers settings because it has a different type of certificate since it is a military site. At any rate just open up Internet explorer. It's annoying but everything you do for this will be done through explorer. It says it's not secure up top, but if you go to the education center, they will just do the same thing.

2) Be sure you know kinda what you want to do before making an account. It will ask you and will make it a lot easier to just go through if you're not second guessing. Register for that, easy peasy. If it takes a few minutes on one of the pages and seems frozen, just leave it alone. It does a live DEERS check so it takes it a few minutes. I promise it will load the next page.

3) After this hopefully you have a school chosen. Whatever school you decide you want to attend (mine is just an online school) Contact the Career counselor/adviser.  They make it super easy. Just let them know you aren't sure about all the steps to using Mycaa and they should be more than happy to give you emails with the steps you need.   They will provide you with an attachment of a career plan.  On the Mycaa website on the right hand side it will ask you to submit a Career plan. This is where the email from your adviser will come in handy, it should tell you how to fill out every line of that form.

4)Now once you submit that call the 1 800 number at the top of the page, it probably says SECO next to it. You need to make an appointment to have a consultation call. This takes 10 maybe 15 minutes to do. They ask you a few questions like your name, email, address, spouses branch, pay grade things like that. After you make your appointment you get to play the waiting game. I personally had to wait a week for my call so definitely get on that.  Whoever you talk to will also send you an email asking you to make a SECO account. This is different than the Mycaa one. Be sure to do that before your call, it will make it so much easier.

5) Your consultation call can last up to an hour is what I was told. Mine really took 25 minutes. I think it depends on what you want to do career wise but just be aware to set aside that amount of time just in case. They basically ask what your goals are. Now between the time of making your appointment and the actual call you may have seen that your plan has been deferred. Don't panic. The consultation call fixes that. They approve your plan after that call. Contact your adviser and let them know that you have had your call and that you are approved.

6) They will now probably send you two emails. One with step by step instructions to apply for FA (financial assistance). I know that is weird. But once you get approved to use Mycaa you then have to actually request the amount of money you need.  The other email will be a electronic signature so that they can enroll you once your FA has been approved. I did both of these things this morning. Now I wait. I was told it can take up to 2 weeks for it to go through but that it rarely takes that long. Maybe a week if that.

And so far, that's all it takes! It sounds like a lot but with the helpful emails from your adviser it's really very easy. Annoying if you don't use explorer but not too bad. And there you go! A little breakdown of what happens. If you have any questions please contact me here in the comments or on Twitter. The link is up top :)

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