I am becoming more convinced that after creation, if you pick up a new Elite Profession via the Starship Duty professional ability, you must pay all five picks and THEN can begin buying stuff under that profession with the next advancement. It sure would be nice to get a definitive ruling on that. I appreciate Don's efforts to get the errata out there but I think we need some *official* errata and it seems that Decipher is being a bit slow about that.
In the game I'm about to play in, the agreement between me and the Narrator (as the two people in the group familiar with the game) was that you bought Starship Duty, which gave you all the prereqs. The next advandment would be spent to acquire the SOEP, and the advancement after that to get the abilities and skills for the EP. So you effectively spend two entire advancements on the Elite Prof. Not sure if that's what you were describing or not.
The Starship Duty and SOEP thread has a pretty definitive answer from Doug Burke of Decipher on how it works, complete with some examples on how to do it both within and without the Starship Officer profession.
Patrick Goodman -- Tilting at Windmills
"I dare you to do better." -- Captain Christopher Pike