Bradley Hood
Contributor, In Military Education
For many students, college represents a final educational obstacle to a job and the ‘real world’. For many veterans, however, college is a different thing altogether. Veteran students come back to school with a great deal of experience and a particular outlook on life imbued by years of military service and deployments. Patricia Murphy writes on some of the unique challenges faced by veterans in college, and how it differs from their civilian peers. She uses two students to illustrate her point: Sam Talkington and Thomas Jenkins.
Talkington is a student at University of Washington’s Foster School of Business, pursuing his education through the post 9/11 Veterans Assistance Act. To veterans like Talkington, who has been deployed twice, it can be difficult to relate to civilian peers, as some students appear apathetic and undisciplined. Thomas Jenkins is another University of Washington veteran, and is president of the Husky United Military Veterans. Jenkins and other members of this organization attempt to assist veterans in the transition from the military to college student. Where the military is rigidly organized and follows a chain of command, college is much fuzzier, and requires an adjustment on the part of a veteran student. Despite the isolation some veterans may feel in this environment, Jenkins and other like him offer a support network. In brief, Murphy has woven together a dialogue on the isolation many veterans feel in college. Murphy’s article addresses through Talkington and Jenkins only a portion of the many unique challenges veterans face, as these challenges are as varied as individual veterans’ personalities and experiences are. It is nonetheless an important topic, and Murphy’s “Veterans In College Face Unique Challenges” does an excellent job.
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