.jpg)
That might seem like a small thing, but for an organization like the Coast Guard, in which people come and go from port constantly, an education services officer (ESO) who handles education counseling as a part-time gig in addition to other duties may very well not be around when someone comes back into port and needs some advice.
“As a civilian, I’m not in the flying status and I’m not on the boat, so I’m not coming and going,” said Camardo. “That’s made a great improvement in the morale of our servicemembers here because they know they can always call up and talk to Paul: ‘He’s always there and able to answer; he’ll hang out for you.’ A lot of times before, at witching hour, people would disappear. But I’m retired military so I don’t care; I’m here to help people.”
Camardo’s experience in education stretches back several decades, and includes work as an instructor in the military for 16 years, as a career counselor and education officer in the Navy, as a high school and college teacher, and as director of a satellite college campus on a military installation in Corpus Christi. Camardo said that he has seen a tremendous increase in interest in education benefits following the launch of the Post-9/11 GI Bill and that efforts to educate servicemembers in his sector have included, among other things, a recent education forum organized by Texas A&M Corpus Christi’s veterans counselor, with whom Camardo helped answer servicemembers’ questions about the plan’s benefits.
In helping members of his sector decide on a career and education path to take after they leave the Coast Guard, Camardo said that he first strives, perhaps not surprisingly, to get a sense of interests and aptitudes.
“I try to pick their brain,” he said. “I’ve got to mine the information out of them, because they don’t really know what they want to do, and there’s nothing wrong with that. For a long time, I didn’t know what I wanted to do myself. So I key in on their interests and what they may have done in the past, and then I steer them in a direction where I think they may be interested.”
The next step, of course, is gaining as much credit for military training and experience as possible, through various tests. Camardo said that often the people he works with are afraid to do the tests, even though they really have nothing to lose except their time and everything to gain.
“It’s a subconscious fear they have, but it’s not a founded fear,” Camardo said. “‘What if I bomb it?’ they say. I say: ‘Don’t worry about it. I have the books here. We can study these things and go take the test.’ A lot of it is their own selfesteem. They need to build it up. It’s not easy stepping back into a college mode of thinking from your military mode of thinking.”
Camardo said he gets quite a bit of solicitation from schools hoping he’ll recommend them to prospective students and is always glad to meet with any school representative and even pass along marketing materials such as pens, markers or other trinkets.
But he always does his own in-depth research on schools. And after discussing all the options of regional versus national certification, online versus traditional classrooms, and other important attributes of colleges and universities, Camardo said he never recommends more than four potential schools for students to consider.
“I found that if I give them all 18 or 20 pamphlets from schools [of a certain type], they don’t make a decision,” he said. ♦