I just started my permanent internship this week at
Alion Science and Technology which is a US government defense contractor. I
work on Foreign Military Sales (FMS), specifically on a contract with the navy
selling undersea weapons. I never grew up interested in the military nor do I
really know anything about the military. Until now. I just finished my first week at Alion and I’ve already learned so much about the military.
I’ve been doing a lot of training on
foreign military sales and security cooperation in general. One of the problems
that I’ve encountered is the countless number of acronyms. There’s an acronym
for almost EVERYTHING in FMS, between Letters of Request (LORs – not to be
confused with a Letter of Recommendation) and Letters of Offer and Acceptance
(LOAs), that it’s almost impossible to remember all of them. I was finally able
to secure a list of common acronyms and thought that I might be able to figure
everything out. Until I started my newest training module. I was reading
through and trying to understand everything to the best of my ability when I
encountered “LOA”. I read over it and was confident that I had understood until
I realized what I was reading didn’t make any sense. Turns out there’s multiple
LOAs in the world of defense contracting acronyms. LOA can also stand for Line
of Activity. Mind = Blown. I thought I was getting the hang of things until
BAM. They throw me a curve ball.
Moral of the story is that you shouldn’t
get too comfortable with what you’re doing because there’s always so much that
you can be learning. Don’t just go through the motions of WAIP; challenge
yourself and always strive to learn something new everyday.
-Rachel Dailey
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