Wednesday, September 28, 2016 // The Statement
4B
Wednesday, September 28, 2016 // The Statement
5B
E
ric Fretz showed up early, wearing a smile
and a tan baseball cap. He emailed me upon
his arrival — stating where exactly he was
sitting — and he made sure to be accommodating,
suggesting we move away from the noise of the
coffee shop to ensure a clearer recording.
He must have picked up my nervous, slightly
unsure demeanor, as he began to answer each
of my questions before I had the chance to ask
them. Fretz talked for nearly 45 minutes without
interruption.
A faculty adviser — and previous member —
of the University of Michigan Student Veteran
Association, Fretz was one of many veterans
on campus who shared with me their stories
transitioning from military life to academia.
From conversations with several, a common
thread emerged — that at the University don’t
know there is a large community of veterans
on campus, made up of students and faculty
much like Fretz, who have faced unpredictable
challenges
and
welcomed
numerous
opportunities associated with military life.
These students and faculty have had a variety
of unique experiences during their time in
the military, including deployment, learning
a new set of social rules, acquiring a different
language and experiencing a stronger sense of
camaraderie than a student organization on
campus can typically provide.
Similarly, some of the veterans said people are
also unaware of the lack of external awareness
and naïveté these veterans often encounter when
re-entering civilian life.
Yet if asked, these men and women will gladly
share their stories, and they will arrive to the
interview prepared and timely (in fact, with time
to spare) — just like their military service taught
them to.
Fretz first arrived on campus in 1985 on a Navy
ROTC scholarship. After graduating four years
later, he went into active duty for the Navy for 20
years. Upon returning to the University in 1998
to pursue a dual Ph.D. in the Combined Program
in Education and Psychology, Fretz faced a lot
of adversity. From being mobilized twice, to
having two children, to managing other family
circumstances, it took him 12 years to complete
the program.
“I just wanted to serve,” Fretz said of his
military aspirations.
Challenges
Fretz said there are many struggles veterans
have when adjusting to civilian student life.
“There’s a fascinating sort of cohesion and
unity of purpose that is common to almost all
(veterans),” he explained. “There’s this element
in the military of trust and common purpose
that’s very hard to replicate and find in the
civilian world, and one of the things that vets
report consistently that puts them most ill at
ease, that gets them the most off-balance, is this
lack of comradeship.”
Because of this, Fretz has a particular way
of depicting the contradictory feelings veterans
sometimes have in his student veteran transition
course.
“There’s that picture of this fully grown Adam
Sandler in a tiny desk surrounded by tiny desks
with tiny kids, and that one picture gets such a
visceral response from the vets, because that’s
how they feel,” Fretz said.
“They are so acutely aware that they are
older and they have had these experiences and
they have sort of changed their world view,
and they behave differently, they understand
accountability differently, they manage their
time differently, their life priorities,” he added.
“That extreme edge of youth has been forcibly
scraped off them and they just feel that very
acutely.”
Timothy Nellett, another veteran and program
coordinator for UM’s Peer Advisors for Veteran
Education, said he enlisted in the U.S. Marine
Corps in 2005. After four years in service, Nellett
started going to college, first attending two
different community colleges before transferring
to the University. Nellett feels the best way to
describe the student veteran community is by
calling them the “non-traditional of the non-
traditional.”
Philip Larson, a veteran of the U.S. Air Force
and the U.S. Air Force Reserve, is now director
of the UM Student Veterans Assistance Program.
He said student veterans oftentimes face
situations where their peers seem immature, in
the sense that they are lacking in life experience.
“To a person who has just been launching
aircraft carriers off the deck of the JFK, or a
person who has been trying not to get blown
up by an IED, this is an extremely foreign
environment,” Larson said, emphasizing the
differences between student veterans and more
“traditional” college students who are focused
on Greek life or joining student organizations.
“They feel very outside and alone.”
Business senior Jonathan Chen, current
president of the Student Veterans Association
on campus and former sergeant in the Marine
Corps, agreed with those sentiments.
“Part of you wants to let it go,” Chen said. “But
then another part of you is like, this is a huge
part of my life, I have something to contribute.
Sometimes it’s fighting between those two …
At first it’s just like any other social identity,
you’re trying to figure out your place within the
University, you’re trying to figure out your place
within society.”
Campus climate
Fretz also noted another significant issue:
a liberal-leaning political climate generally
associated with the University.
“It tends to be left-of-center and not
particularly pro-military,” Fretz said. “They just
feel like they’re not particularly understood,
sometimes they feel like they’re treated with
contempt … A lot of times they do feel excluded.
It’s interesting, they’re not monolithically
conservative,
but
they
are
monolithically
respectful of their time in the military.”
One recent example of the conflicting military
rhetoric on campus was the incident regarding
the showing of “American Sniper” in April 2015.
Students raised concern about the film’s anti-
Islam images, while others, including veterans,
said they felt students’ negative responses to the
film were indicative of a lack of appreciation for
their military service.
This has led to divergent responses about
whether vets decide to be vocal about their
military career on campus. Fretz referred to this
as “coming out” as a vet — some student veterans
remain “closeted”, while others are open about
their experiences and find either that people do
not quite know how to react to them, or react to
them negatively.
Cassie Michaels, now a University graduate,
was enlisted in the Marine Corps prior to coming
to the University. Michaels completed one
semester of college at UM-Flint before enlisting,
and one additional there while applying
to transfer to the Ann Arbor campus after
serving. Michaels was in her early 20s entering
sophomore year, making her a few years older
than her peers.
She echoed many of the sentiments of other
veterans, such as feeling unaccustomed to
campus life. In particular, she recounted a story
about a class that had an iClicker question in
lecture, and though the traditional freshmen
and sophomores in the class had an iClicker with
them, she didn’t have one and did not know what
they were. She also failed her first assignment at
the University, something that was also novel to
her. Both instances, she said, led to her feeling
behind and made her feel she did not align to the
campus climate.
As part of an even smaller demographic on
campus — female veteran students — Michaels
said she felt challenged and alone. Though she
started going to SVA meetings upon arriving to
campus, she found she was the only female there.
“We may have had the same experiences while
in the military, but they still wouldn’t be the
same because they would be male and I would be
female,” Michaels said. “I just didn’t feel like my
experiences would be valid.”
Dentistry junior Alyssa Carrillo, who was a
dental lab technician in the Air Force for four
years before beginning college in fall 2013, said
her troubles identifying with fellow veterans
also stemmed from there being so few females
who were in the military on campus. Her own
experiences now contribute to much of her work
as a peer adviser in the Office of New Student
Programs, where she often reaches out to other
female veterans.
“We’re all just student vets trying to figure
out how to integrate ourselves into the culture,”
Carrillo said. “I always get all the time ‘you’re a
vet? You look like you’re 18 and you’re a woman’
— it’s just the stereotypes. But I kind of like that.
I think it’s cool to not be a stereotype.”
Cultural transition
Along with these challenged, veterans said the
transition veterans have to make from military
life to academia is also a significant change.
Fretz, for example, transitioned between life as
an ROTC student, receiving another bachelor’s
degree while serving time in active duty and
getting a Master’s during his time as a reservist.
“I had to jump back and forth between the
academic world and the military world, and
those changes are very dramatic,” Fretz said.
“Everybody has their reasons for raising their
hand, but once you raise your hand and swear
that oath, it’s like you’re not in Kansas anymore
… You realize these huge shifts in how systems
work, and these different worlds.”
Fretz said he experienced a cultural mismatch
on a number of occasions. For example,
in graduate school, per requests from his
professors, he was doing multiple projects at
once, often while sacrificing his school work. He
said he had a military mindset that his professors
were similar to his senior officers, and that they
must have had good, important reasoning behind
giving him so much work.
He added that he has found it interesting
interacting with veterans who are similar to
how he was, from a faculty member perspective
now saying he understands his students’ natural
tendency to exhibit respect toward authority
figures. However, he tells them that in a
university setting, it is preferred they interact
with their professors in a way that is usually
much different from their senior officers.
Graduate student Aaron Silver, president
of the Ross School of Business Armed Forces
Association, said he came to the University to
pursue a master’s degree in business following
five years as an active-duty artillery officer.
During his time in the military, Silver was
primarily stationed in Germany but also had two
deployments overseas.
“I think all of those that go through the
transition experience a little bit of what I
call a culture whiplash,” Silver said. “The
military is a lifestyle and to some degree, you’re
indoctrinated. It’s a culture with certain norms
and mores and expectations and shared beliefs
and shared values, and when you leave that
culture, life is different.”
Silver, however, made sure to highlight that,
“while it can be a little jarring to go from military
time to Michigan time, (veterans) pay it forward
with our shared experiences.”
Mental health misconceptions
The
veterans
interviewed
also
talked
extensively about misconceptions attached to
veteran stability.
“It’s all too common for someone to say, ‘You
were a vet? Did you get deployed? Did you kill
anyone?’ ” Fretz said. “This idea that every vet is
kind of a ticking time bomb, or when you survey
employers ‘What’s your biggest concern hiring
vets?’ and everybody just thinks that all vets
have PTSD, and it’s really not true.”
Larson echoed Fretz’s sentiments and said
veteran students come back from combat to
a — albeit unintentional — naïveté about their
experiences on campus.
“Two months ago, or a year ago, they were
in charge of multi-million-dollar aircraft, they
were in charge of keeping other people safe,
they were in charge of other people’s well-
being as an enlisted NCO,” Larson said. “And
they come to this campus and nobody gets it —
nobody gets it.”
Nellett recounted a situation where a student
once found out how old he was — older than
most of the other students in the class — and
asked him what he had been doing with his life,
inappropriately insinuating that, because he
was older, he must have been taking time off or
not taking school seriously. When the student
discovered Nellett was in the military, she
simply responded, “Please don’t kill me.”
“There are some people out there that are
like that and create more of a divide than there
needs to be, and it mostly stems from a place of
ignorance,” Nellett said. “I really don’t think
that most of the time it’s coming from a place of
malicious intent — it’s really a lack of awareness
or understanding.”
While on campus, Michaels said she had
feelings of anxiety in crowded lecture halls,
nightmares and struggled in high-pressure
situations — all of which she said are symptoms
of her Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
“I may jump and flinch whenever I hear
a loud noise, or I may feel panicked when I’m
in an enclosed area with a lot of people, but
you just have to trust me that I’ve got this,”
Michaels said. “When people think of veterans,
they automatically think of this broken person
who can’t function in society, and I think that in
order to change that, the veterans that are doing
well and becoming these really successful,
functional citizens, they need to identify
themselves as veterans … And the reason why
they don’t is because of the stigma.”
Because people experience things differently,
veterans stressed that traditional students
should not generalize student veterans in
the same way student veterans should not
generalize the student population as ignorant of
the military experience.
“Like any other social identity, we come with
our stereotypes, we come with the stigmas that
are attached to it,” Chen said.
Larson added that veterans tend to have their
own culture that would be beneficial to campus
diversity — something Fretz echoed — that could
improve other students’ misunderstandings.
“From the veteran’s perspective, they find it
puzzling and frustrating that the mental health
thing is always made salient,” Fretz said. “You
never know what journey people are on, and so
you shouldn’t discount them — everybody has
something to teach here.”
Resources
Among the challenges, many resources
are also available at the University, including
several led by veterans.
The Student Veterans Assistance Program,
run out of the Office of New Student Programs,
has goals similar to those of student veteran
organizations on campus in ensuring veteran
students have the resources necessary to be
successful in their academic, professional and
social careers at the University and beyond.
Larson,
the
director
of
the
Students
Veterans Assistance Program, said he works
on a number of efforts to organize University
veteran services, such as assisting with
college applications, collaborating with VA
representatives in the Office of the Registrar
and coordinating with certifying officials to
ensure students get the appropriate veteran
benefits. Additionally, he works with the Office
of Financial Aid, University Housing, graduate
student organizations and individual college
advising within the University, as well as
coodinates peer mentor activities.
“Along with the academic stress, they may
have other life stressors, and so if we can help
out with the life stress part, the academic stress
becomes a lot more manageable,” Larson said.
In his work, Larson said he is able to reduce
misconceptions students have about what
the military does, honor veterans’ sacrifice
and service and help them use their military-
instilled skills in conjunction with a UM
education, all in an attempt to improve the
military-to-academia culture shock that he had
seen in previous years.
“Students came out of the military with …
different kind of language, different kind of
skillsets, different kind of expectations,” Larson
said. “And when they got to campus, they found
themselves in a different cultural environment
than what they were used to.”
Read more at michigandaily.com
MILITARY TIME
TO MICHIGAN
TIME:
HOW STUDENT
ADAPT TO
CAMPUS LIFE
VETERANS