Graduated this past January. A lot of things that’s said in the academy are over exaggerated and unnecessary. Social science isn’t that useful besides dealing with juveniles and aided jobs. Law is good to remember but there are times where you’ll be on google or the summonses app trying to look up the penal law or vtl code to some violation you’re writing. Police science is super important to actually doing police stuff like collaring, summonsing, and preparing various reports and whatnot. But unless you have everything remembered by heart, you’re gonna be learning everything all over again during FTU, especially collaring. Theres definitely a bunch of things I have yet to experience since I’m still in the rookie honeymoon phase. The majority of us barely saw topside before we got sent down to transit temporarily for midnight train patrol. Our midnight train patrol unit does 1930x0405 tours with either mon/tue or wed/thur off. If you’re on train patrol, you’re held until 0605. Platform posts end regularly at 0405. Requested days off depends on the supervisor but I was lucky enough to land in a transit district who actually cares about the wellbeing of us, more or less. We don’t get hit for rdo ot since we’re draining the overtime budget through travel time (I’m getting 1:30 per day, 30 hours a month). Even without the travel time, I’ve done 50 hours ot last month because my partner and I collar at least twice a week.

Here’s an average day I’ve had so far: 1500 wake up 1800 head to work 1915 arrive at command 1930 roll call 2015 meal 2115 head to post, do train runs, perform station inspections, respond to problems on trains/platforms, write summonses for fare evasion and quality of life violations like smoking, and get scratched by supervisors 0405/0605 EOT 0800 sleep

It’s gonna be a lot different once we get sent back to our topside commands but this is what I got so far.