Greetings, readers!

We hope your semester ended well and that your summer is off to a restful start. This year, rather than taking a break between semesters, Future 411 will arrive in your inbox with this May issue and a summer issue to help you keep career development on your radar even when school isn't in session. After all, the wisdom and opportunities your colleagues and our alumni have to offer is valuable to us all in every season!

As we head into this holiday weekend, we would like to take a moment to pause and celebrate the hard work, commitment, and sacrifice of our servicemen and women, and in doing so, we honor them this Memorial Day by considering the experience of those who served safely (and maybe still do) and chose to re-engage in civilian life as graduate students here at CU-Boulder. With the wars of the past decade, the work of our veterans surrounds us all each day, and stories of life after military service fills our news and media. The story of the veteran student is rarely told, however, despite the high enrollment numbers at colleges and universities like ours across the nation as former military members take advantage of the post-9/11 G.I. Bill benefits they earned while in uniform. The stories that do make the news most often cover older undergraduate students starting or returning to school to make a go at associates or bachelor's degrees. So, this month Future 411 turns its lens on the experience of the brilliant veteran graduate students that fill our classrooms here in Boulder and use their former career experience to shape who they are and the work they do as academics while enriching our scholar community and workforce. Veterans are often the colleagues sitting to our right and our left even if many civilian grad students may not realize it, and theirs is a unique story that must be told. 

It is our hope that this issue will help inform our veteran graduate students of the resources for general academic support and career planning help available to them at CU-Boulder. It is also our intention to bring these resources and the work of veteran students on our campus to the attention of graduate students who might not be aware of the veteran world that exists alongside the civilian experience at our university so that we all may be more aware and well-rounded scholars, job seekers, and future employers. To that end, we are pleased to offer interviews with Rex Laceby, former Marine and the new Veteran Career Adviser in our offices at Career Services, and Ben Purser, Navy vet and PhD candidate in the Political Science Department. This month's articles from The Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, and Science Careers all address issues of the veteran experience in today's academic environment. Several of the jobs in our featured postings also give preference to veteran applicants (were you aware Career Buffs had that search feature?).

We hope everyone will find this month's issue interesting and useful, and we also wish a safe and happy holiday for you all as we honor those who made the ultimate sacrifice for our country this weekend. We would also like to remind you that Career Services is open all summer long, and we are available for counseling, testing, and research help to support you in your job search and career development. Take advantage of the off-season to come visit us and kick off your post-graduation preparation. In the meantime, we wish you rest and productivity -- watch for our summer issue in July! 

Best,

What was your impetus for joining the military, and what made you decide to return to graduate school after your service?

While I initially got a job working as a consultant in Shanghai after attending school in Nanjing, I felt compelled to do something more meaningful after 9/11 and joined the U.S. Navy as an intelligence officer. I served nine years - including tours out of Pearl Harbor, Hawai'i and Washington, DC. Although I worked on a number of issues during my service, I was mainly assigned to work operations related to East Asian security concerns, since there weren't many Navy lieutenants who spoke proficient Mandarin.  That professional focus helped me realize the importance of maritime disputes -- disagreements over which country has sovereignty over certain islands, areas of ocean, and their natural resources. Because that area of study is under-explored both from policy and academic perspectives, I decided to focus my PhD research on the problem. The Political Science department here at CU-Boulder has unique experts on East Asia (Professor Steve Chan), territorial disputes (Professor Jaroslav Tir), and international resource governance (Professor Krister Andersson), all of whom I am fortunate to have serving on my committee.

How did your military service shape your graduate studies, and how did it prepare you for your PhD?

It was initially difficult to reconcile the theoretically-driven, quantitatively-anchored approach to International Relations with what I learned in the intelligence community (IC). That military experience gave me a detailed understanding of specific areas and issues, but did not translate well into academic discussions about generalizable problems or patterns. Fortunately, the faculty and staff here at CU-Boulder took the time to meet with me and help me learn how to think and write about issues outside of the IC.

What specific challenges have you faced as a military veteran in a graduate program? What advantages have you found?

Sometimes the challenges are simple, like being older, but sometimes they are complicated, like how the topics we study can seem personal.  For example, one of the classes for which I was a teaching assistant had a professor who gave several lectures on American policy in Afghanistan; this professor would repeatedly use the phrase "what we're doing over there" in connection with policies and behaviors that were less than this professor's ideal. This professor would similarly address the degree to which the country had become war weary and frequently say that "Americans don't like to see body bags." After one of my recitations, two of the students whom I knew to be vets and who knew me to be a vet came to see me. The first vet pointed out that he "didn't remember seeing [that professor] 'over there'" and asked if the rest of the term was going to be full of such lectures. The second vet reminded me that those body bags were full of our brothers and asked how the professors tone didn't bother me.  The answer to the last question, of course, was that it did bother me, but that the process of education required being pushed outside of our comfort zone - and that included being respectful even to those that aren't always respectful of military service.

The advantages seem cliché. After years of having to be at work before five in the morning, teaching an eight o'clock recitation on a Monday morning seems manageable. Similarly, after preparing for multi-person, multi-month deployments, it is not too intimidating to get assigned a week-long "team project" for a class. In addition to the trite ways that military experience helps with organizational skills as well as time and stress management, it often seems to help provide focus for academic efforts. Specifically, I wouldn't have been able to defend my prospectus so soon in my course of study if I didn't have the experiences in the Navy that helped me think through certain problems and decide how I wanted to analyze them here.

What resources on campus or otherwise have been of special assistance to you as a veteran seeking your degree?

The Office of Veteran Services has been amazing. Barney Ballinger, Stew Elliott, Cliff Connor, and all the rest of the team are great at helping new veteran students get settled and then helping those student vets succeed.  Beyond just that office, of course, there is a host of resources available to those that want them. For example, Kristina Spaeth is an academic counselor who specializes in helping veterans make the most of the course opportunities that CU-Boulder offers.  As of this year, we now have Rex Laceby working as an advisor in Career Services, who is a vet himself and assigned to help student veterans find jobs. The Student Veterans Association (SVA) also works to help student veterans, but my role as the president of that group might bias my opinion there. Regardless, CU-Boulder has a great collection of people and programs to help veterans succeed.

How has connecting with other graduate students who are veterans helped you with your studies?

I was elected the President of the Student Veterans Association last year, and so I have interacted with a lot of the veterans here on campus, but most of them are undergraduates.  Most of the graduate student vets are very focused on specific programs - and often have families and other obligations outside the classroom; spending time with such driven people helps keep me motivated to accomplish my academic goals.

What advice do you have for other military veterans who are considering a graduate degree at CU-Boulder? What career advice do you have for your fellow veteran graduate students?

The most important thing that a prospective student could do is to find out about their own potential department. If I have learned anything after being here for a few years, and serving as my department's representative to UGGS, it is that every department has its own policies. For example, my wife - who also served as a Navy officer - has experienced a different transition to the aerospace engineering department than I did in political science. I wouldn't be able to prepare a potential aerospace graduate student nearly as well as she could. So, potential grad students should find a contact in their own department - or contact the Student Veterans Association or Office of Veteran Services and ask to be put in touch with a vet in the department that interests them.  In terms of career advice, that also seems to vary greatly from department to department. 

The political imperative-absolutely universal in America today-that one "support the troops" has confusing corollaries. First, the requirement to support the troops implies, oddly, that men and women who have risked their lives in unbelievable circumstances might have unusually delicate sensibilities. And second, there's a fascination with the veteran as traumatized and necessarily wounded, and therefore as either somehow incomplete or as perhaps having a blighted or limited future. 

My own work is in contemporary American literature and trauma theory, and I am well aware of representations of the soldier as fractured and prone to nightmares, hallucinations, and flashbacks. It's not an accident, after all, that Post Traumatic Stress Disorder receives an entry in the DSM in 1980 in response to the psychological effects observed during and after the Vietnam War, and it's suggestive that Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried has become so universal a touchstone. I am also keenly aware of the needs of my own students who have experienced traumatic events first hand, perhaps unfairly on the lookout for signs of emotional and physiological strain.

New York Times and on Connecticut Public Radio. The author of a memoir and a book of fiction, he also contributes to Not Alone, an online community for soldiers and their families. A second example, Shane Matthews, who served in the Navy from 2000-2005, was involved in CCSU's Veterans History Project, which preserves oral histories of soldiers' experiences.) He graduates from Harvard Law in the spring. Read more