Pushing Brains Over Brawn at Academic Boot Camp for Veterans at Caltech

In a boot camp that tests brains over brawn, military veterans seeking a college education convened at Caltech this summer to simulate the intensity of finals week among faculty, researchers and mentors, participating in a program that helps them assess whether they are ready to transition to academia.

The Warrior-Scholar Project is a STEM intensive founded in 2012 at Yale and has served nearly 3,000 veterans, challenging them with up to 75 hours of academic work. The program has been offered at Caltech for seven years.

Participants choose between three types of programming: STEM, business fundamentals and a humanities course. The most popular is the STEM track — science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

“The idea is that by going through WSP at Caltech, they understand, ‘I have what it takes to be at one of these phenomenal institutions,’ ” said Ryan Pavel, chief executive of the nonprofit and a former Marine sergeant. “If I want to pursue something at Caltech or MIT, then there’s a pathway.”

About 80% of the project’s participants complete their degree, Pavel said. More than half are first-generation college students.

“This is a population which is very worth actively recruiting because there’s specialized talent here,” Pavel said.

Universities nationwide host the boot camps, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford, Princeton, Yale, Harvard, Columbia, Notre Dame and USC. The program is free for participants, funded by a host of local and national foundations, corporations and individual donors.

“There’s something about the demystification of just being on campus helping them build the skills to actually excel in a STEM curriculum,” Pavel said. “We are committed to making sure veterans understand what they are capable of, and that could very well include education at an elite institution.”

A long day of boot camp

The Caltech camp begins at 8:30 a.m. with a class on physics and motion, continues with an activity such as a behind-the-scenes lab tour or science exhibit, and concludes with rigorous problem sets that students rarely finish by the end of a day that typically stretches to 10 or 11 p.m.

“We want them to push themselves to their limits here so that they can see where they need to improve before college,” said Joshua Saint Juste, a program fellow, teaching assistant and former participant.

The boot camp fosters an environment where students feel comfortable failing, said Saint Juste, 20, who will attend Kennesaw State University in the fall.

The program “shows you your strengths and your weaknesses, and what you want to do to fix your weaknesses, to get strong, to get prepared for college,” he said.

Students have the opportunity to work with researchers, PhD candidates and professors conducting research at the campus through a group research project in which they present their findings to peers and professors.

“I was working with an astrophysicist, and we were measuring the distance between stars within different galaxies … I got a little taste of what astrophysics could be,” said Diego Maldonado, 23, a former participant and a current fellow who will attend Amherst Univerisity in the fall.

Most participants already have been accepted to college, but many have not been in school for a while. Many are delaying college to enter into active duty first, even if they already received acceptance letters.

Building a bridge to academia

“Everybody is on a different journey. What we want to do here is equip them, so that they’re ready when they do join,” Saint Juste said.

Warrior-Scholar Project fellows teach a college readiness curriculum to help inspire confidence.

“It’s been comforting that not everybody has it fully figured out yet,” participant Ignacio Mora said. “We are very supportive of one another.”

“There is a certain type of tight-knit community that veterans have, but when you can maintain these connections across the country, it makes us feel like we belong in these elite academic communities,” Maldonado added.

Professors are eager to work with student veterans and believe the life experience veterans bring to the classroom is crucial to the intellectual diversity of institutions like Caltech.

“I assume they’ve encountered much bigger challenges than being in a classroom and so they seem to come to it with a really healthy attitude and a willingness to engage with the material. That made it really fun to work with them,” Caltech LIGO laboratory staff scientist Jonah Kanner said. The LIGO laboratory is a major research facility that partners with MIT to study gravitational-wave astrophysics.

“Being in the military is very intense, but a lot of the skills we develop in the military come out in academics … I would also say that after service, we are definitely a lot more supportive of each other,” Mora said.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

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