Straight Talk for Veterans: A Guide to Success in College

By David Vacchi, Kevin Jones, Janine Wert and 7 more

Straight Talk for Veterans: A Guide to Success in College answers the call by veterans and practitioners to move away from academic volumes that don't resonate with the reader and frankly fall short of really helping veterans succeed in college. With contributions from student veteran experts such as, Kevin Jones, Janine Wert, Aynsley Diamond, Adam Fullerton, Sharon Young, Michael Kirchner, Sarah Minnis, Glenn Phillips, Sosanya Jones, and David Vacchi, this volume answers the need from the field for a text that can both inform practitioners who intend to help veterans succeed and speak in no-nonsense language that veterans prefer. Veteran-friendliness is a straightforward concept that is, in most contexts, more lip-service than action and is rarely achieved. Conceptualizing veteran-friendliness is best done in plain language, the way veterans talk to each other, and is about improving the cultural competency of non-veterans.

Straight Talk for Veterans is a straight-forward guide primarily intended for those transitioning from the military to higher education, but also for veteran transitions to civilian life. Designed as a companion text aligned with veteran transition curricula, it serves the dual purpose of guiding veterans through the initial culture shock that can come with joining an academic community directly from the military and guiding practitioners to be able to support veterans through a more culturally competent lens. Straight talk's diverse chapter authors deliver a comprehensive array of accessible information that covers concepts of negotiating transitions, navigating higher education, skills assessment and translation, and a series of fresh perspectives on concepts frequently misunderstood or mischaracterized by civilians. Written in a style that speaks directly to the student, this text is most valuable to the student veteran or the campus that wants to focus their energies on the real success of student veterans: graduating and finding a job.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Nov 11, 2019
• ISBN: 9781543986211

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CHAPTER 1

Over Here: Adjusting to Campus after Military Service

Kevin Jones

Transitions are challenging. Starting kindergarten. Joining the military. Going to your first duty station. Deploying for the first time (or the second, or the third…). Reenlisting. Leaving active duty. Every event involves a similar process and circumstances. New and changed relationships. Different routines. Verifying or debunking assumptions (about both yourself and your new environment). Adapting to new roles. All of these circumstances, even when thoroughly planned, can become overwhelming, even stressful, especially if this transition is dramatic or abrupt.

Make no mistake. Whether you served for four years or 40, leaving the military and returning to the civilian world is a huge transition. In fact, it’s one of the most difficult challenges faced by most veterans. If you’re a combat veteran, the transition can be even harder. In the midst of everything else you’re doing, you will experience tension as you move from your previous identity (military service member) to several simultaneous new identities (veteran, civilian employee, college student, different component of the military), while moving toward a future yet to be determined (college graduate, new job).

But transitioning doesn’t have to be difficult; you just need a plan. Fortunately, you’ve already been taught how to assess new or unfamiliar situations. You know that the first step is to organize what you know and what you don’t. Research deeper to fill in any information gaps as best you can. Then scout some more and move out. As a matter of fact, you already know the name for this process. It’s called the military decision-making process, typically documented as an operations order.

Here’s a quick refresher:

The five-paragraph order, or operations order, or OPORD, depending on your branch of service, is a way to organize information about a situation for a military unit in the field. It is most often used to break down a unit’s role in the larger scheme of things, i.e. Squad A needs to secure a building while the rest of the company attacks Objective B. If you served in the Army or the Marine Corps you’ve probably got this format memorized. If you served in a different branch, don’t worry—it isn’t that difficult to pick up. Besides, we’re going to use it to plan your transition into higher education, so everyone, regardless of service, will be able to put this into effect.

The five paragraphs can be remembered by the acronym SMEAC: Situation, Mission, Execution, Administration/Logistics, Command and Signal. Before we get ahead of ourselves: As many of you are aware, there are quite a few subtypes in a five-paragraph order, but for the purpose of this chapter I won’t be going into those. The main headings of a five-paragraph order are usually more than enough detail for this purpose.

Situation

You are a recently (or perhaps not-so-recently) separated veteran of the armed forces. You want to enroll in college, but it seems like a daunting task. There are universities, colleges, community colleges, technical and trade schools, online, distance, and hybrid classes. Day and night. Full and part-time. And what about paying for it? Grants, financial aid, loans, scholarships, the list goes on and on. How are you supposed to sort through all the noise?

First, take account of your situation: What is your ultimate purpose for attending higher education? To get a good job? To expand your mind? To become a better and more informed citizen? In the same way the first step of an OPORD asks you to understand the situation, the first thing you need to do is understand the institution you are considering attending. What are the obstacles? Who are your allies? Know the terrain. Does this college offer interesting programs? Does it have a good reputation? Is it accredited? In short, will it get you where you want to go in the way you want to get there? It doesn’t matter how great the football team is, or what famous person graduated from there, or how wonderful the campus looks—if the school isn’t a good fit for you and your life, don’t go there.

Mission

Who, What, Where, When, Why? This is the problem you are trying to solve, your mission statement. Gather all the information you can. Use it to determine your course of action to accomplish your mission and succeed in higher education. This can be as simple as On Monday, I will meet with the admissions advisor at State University to discuss enrolling in my preferred degree program. Or, This afternoon at 3 p.m. I will meet with the student veteran’s office to complete all of my GI Bill paperwork. This doesn’t have to be your overarching goal in higher ed. In fact, it’s probably better if it isn’t. Earning your degree can seem overwhelming when looked at in totality. Like any large mission, breaking it down into smaller goals and objectives will make the process more manageable and let you assess your progress along the way.

Execution

Once you have examined the situation and clarified your mission, it’s time to move out! This is where you will begin your academic experience, job hunt, or new job. In the case of college, your overall mission is to earn a college degree that will facilitate gainful employment. This happens in phases just like operations in the military. The phases of your operation are straightforward: preparation, first semester, first year, middle year(s), final year, and job search. Further, each semester can be broken into phases such as: semester preparation, course #1, course #2, course #3, course #4, and subsequent semester preparation. Finally, each course and assignment can be broken down into the components of an operation in the same way—find your routine and master it!

Administration and Logistics

This is a list of what items you need to accomplish your mission. Higher education, while not a life and death situation, still requires good logistical planning to be successful. How will you pay for college? Where will you live? How will you pay for food, clothing, and transportation? If you’ve never had to live on a budget, now is the time to learn. Pay attention to the real cost of college, not just tuition. Many students who have earned full tuition scholarships are often shocked to find out that they have an unexpected cost of room and board expenses, or those pesky fees, which can lead to dropping out, or mission failure.

What tasks, if any, can you delegate to others to help you with succeeding in college? Will someone need to get you to the college to meet with an advisor? Who will help you with financial aid and GI Bill paperwork? Are there people who know higher education who can help you with areas you still have questions about? Before you joined the service, you probably talked to several people separate from your recruiter who helped you make that decision. Higher education should be the same way. Advisors, while key assets in your higher education journey, should only be one of several places you obtain information about your education. Do your research. Make sure you know about the college you selected and the major in which you are interested. Task others to help you with this decision, especially if they know about higher education themselves. In the military you relied on, and respected the opinions of, people who had been there, done that. Higher education is the same way.

Command and Signal

This is the one area that doesn’t have an exact correlation to higher education, but it still has a place in this discussion. What you will have to do is plan for unforeseen events. What happens if you miss a class, fail a test, or fail a course? You need to know who to contact for help and how to contact them. You need faculty e-mail addresses, phone numbers, office hours and locations. You need to know where all of the help resources are on campus and how to contact those offices, including, academic support, peer tutoring, veterans’ office, veterans benefits staff member, disability services, non-traditional student services, dean of students’ office, library, etc. Without contact information, small challenges can turn into seemingly insurmountable obstacles, which can then lead to withdrawing from college altogether, again mission failure. There will be challenges. There will be things that go wrong no matter how much you plan for them. But with contact information, you will be better prepared to handle the challenges of transitioning into higher education, and the next chapter of your life.

As our editor, David has taken great care to conceptualize transitions from points of view that are informed by military experience. I’ve transitioned from two services and into and out of higher education at the undergraduate and graduate level. I used the Montgomery GI Bill; David used the Post 9/11 GI Bill when transitioning into his doctoral program; Mike used the Montgomery GI Bill, Wisconsin’s GI Bill, and the Post 9/11 GI Bill to earn multiple degrees, and Adam has used state and federal education benefits – the rest have just served veterans on campus as staff or faculty members for many, many years. We’ve got it pretty solidly nailed down in this volume. Remember, you’re transitioning out of the military and into the civilian world, but this need not be scary or uncomfortable. Keep in mind that your experience in the military is sometimes important, but other times it’s irrelevant. You don’t have to prove yourself except through your academic performance. Use this text as a guide to help you move from being a military member to a college student, or transitioning professional, and on to a career that will keep you contributing to the mission of a new organization. Remember, this transition will be a challenge for you, but imagine what it would be like for civilians to transition into the military! Oh right, you did that when you went through your initial entry training. You won’t get anywhere near that kind of close support and supervision in higher education or transitioning straight into the civilian workforce. So, it will be up to you to identify problems, develop a plan, and apply resources to succeed in your mission: good luck!

Conceptualizing Support for Student Veterans

To be plain, some of what goes on in higher education is what we used to call in the Army, MSU operations (Make Stuff Up). David wrestles with student veteran MSU operations all the time and is slowly winning the war with research and proven best practices. To offer you a global conceptualization of the major aspects affecting your transition to, and through, college, here’s a brief description of David’s conceptual model of student veteran support. You’ll find that everything relevant to your experience fits into this model and it shows where some misguided efforts happen and where the essentials for success are.

Figure 1. Vacchi’s model of student veteran support¹

Where We’ve Been Stuck

The vertical axis offers where many scholars and campuses focus on their support for veterans: General and unique campus services and general and veteran-specific transition support programming. There’s nothing wrong with these areas, and they all can have a positive effect on your transition, but these are not necessarily essential for your success. You might ask, Why would an author of online veteran transition courses and the editor of this book say that a veteran transition courses are not necessary for your success? Doesn’t that undermine his ability to sell books and online courses? And these would be good questions, but those that view veterans as broken and helpless are the only ones that would agree with those sentiments. The reality is, David doesn’t want to sell books and training to people that don’t need them, only to those that will benefit from them. Proper design of transition courses and faculty and staff training will make them beneficial to all participants, but this is not always the case. Also, let’s talk about you, and your peers, you’re not exactly slackers in most cases. Without all of these fancy books, transitions programs, and well-intended help veterans are still one of the most successful student populations on campus, with over 70% earning their degrees. The national average is significantly lower than that, and this tells the thinking person that veterans are going to be successful anyway. What books like this, and their accompanying transition courses, can do is to make veteran transitions smoother and faster so veterans can perform even better in college!

Really Getting at Success

Now let’s look at the horizontal axis. This is the hard stuff, because it is mushy, involves faculty, and other actors not under the control of college administrators. I know, scary, right? Simply put, you’re not going to college to join the veterans club, or to experience a transitions support program, or even to use academic support services: you’re going to college to learn, earn a degree, and move on to a good job in your life after the military. The vertical axis can, at best, support your college goals – it can’t directly influence your success. At worst, poorly thought out or conducted elements of the vertical axis can greatly disrupt your success, like having some sort of service-related injury and NOT using disability services (much more on that later in the book).

The horizontal axis includes areas that have been time-tested anchors of the college student experience research literature for 40, or so, years and are frequently ignored by contemporary scholars researching the experiences of veterans in college. Simply put, and this is true for all students, the quality of your academic interactions with peer students and faculty will directly influence your academic experiences and thus, your success. Enough negative experiences with your student peers or faculty members and you’re likely to drop out of college, or transfer, which also can put you in jeopardy of nor earning a degree (hence why college choice is so important). As David wrote in the foreword, all you really need are non-negative interactions in your academic experiences and you should be fine: The better your experiences are academically, the more likely it is you will succeed. This is why there is a push for faculty and staff professional development training regarding student veterans, to help improve these interactions.

The final aspect of the horizontal axis is the mushiest and hardest to control for higher education – although controlling your academic experiences is nearly impossible for administrators who have little say over how a professor runs his or her classroom. Support. Support comes from two main sources: your peers and off campus. Many campus staff advocates know this, which is why they always recommend you frequent the veterans lounge or join the veterans club. A simple statistic disrupts this as a cure-all for veteran support however: over 80% of all student veterans neither join the campus veteran’s club, nor frequent the lounge – or these support resources don’t exist, making the attempt moot. And still, veterans have been succeeding in college better than almost all other student groups. Why? Well David’s research began to uncover the secret: veteran personal support networks and validation from what he calls a