More Strand and Job description

There seems to be quite a bit of confusion out there when it comes to the avionics school at Pensacola. Hopefully this will clear most of that up.

First, 5900 field is basically electronics, the specific MOSs I know from Pensacola are MATC (Marine Air Traffic Control) technicians: comm, nav, radar. 6300 field is O-level (organizational, or flightline/aircraft) avionics. 6400 field is I-level (Intermediate, or component level) avionics. When a person enlists all they can pick on there contract is the field designation, as the Marine Corps throws them whereever needed.

Now for the confusing part. For any parents, family, girlfriends, etc worried because their Marine doesn't know what's going on, that's normal. The best way to deal with it is to not expect anything based on orders coming out of MCT or what the Marine wants to get for an MOS. Just stay loose, or "semper gumby" as you won't know until it happens. I went through Pensacola about 7 years ago, and I've heard some things have changed, but from my experience, MOS assignment seems to be a combination of timing and needs of the Marine Corps. I apologize if some of this info is out-of-date, but all 59/63/6400 Marines first go through an avionics common core, about 2 months, then, and I believe it depends on the schedule, the Marines either go to O-strand for 6300s or I-strand for 59/6400s. O-strand was about 2 months and I-strand is 4. At the end of strand, thats where specific MOS's are assigned, seemingly arbitrarily. As for 5900s, at the end of the course they gave us the option of selecting that school, but it's still at there discression.Upon completing strand youre given a genral MOS designator; 6311 for O-strand and 6411 for I-strand, which just designates "general avionics Marine" then they'll get their specific designator after C-school.

My personal experience went like this: I got to Pensacola under 5900 orders. After Common Core, my whole class went I-strand, then just before graduation we got submitt our duty station wish list and whether or not we wanted MATC(5900). Now the top 3 Marines in the class(me and 2 others) all requested this, but when they gave us our final orders, it seemed they just went the class list, as the 3 of us at the top all got uav tech and the next, like 6 guys got MATC. So I went up the road to Whiting field as a 6411, then was immediately redesignated as 6311, as uav tech is O-level. After 2 months of school finally went to fleet as 6314. So I started as 5900 to 6400 and finally ended up as 6314, UAV tech.

Hope this isn't too confusing and helps with any questions anyone may have. Feel free to post more questions or any info thats been changed in the past 7 years.

Also, as a side note, for anyone concerned about ATC (72/7300) a largely unkown curveball could be uav operator (7314), that's how most of ours were picked.