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 

