VETERAN TO SCHOLAR
ECU military veteran ‘boot camp’ enlists civilian medical students
After a 17-year career in the U.S. Marine Corps that took him to 43 different countries and eight deployments – including three combat tours and two dangerous peacekeeping missions – Jeremiah Caudill decided to pursue a degree from East Carolina University.
He liked the campus, the sense of community and, of course, the Pirate logo.
Caudill, who retired from the Marines as a staff sergeant in 2012, had not been a student in nearly two decades, so he opted to earn an associate degree from Johnston Community College before transferring to ECU.
But those two and a half years of classroom experience were still not enough to prepare him for university life.
“I got here and I’m 20 years older than the average student. I was considered a sophomore and I’ve got children the ages of a lot of the freshmen and sophomores at that point,” Caudill said. “I just didn’t realize how out of touch I was with the culture at the time. And I had been retired from the Marine Corps for long enough that I was no longer used to the fast pace that was required for a successful collegiate career. I thought, ‘This isn’t for me.’”
Caudill was contemplating dropping out when he was invited to take part in the university’s Veteran to Scholar Boot Camp – an intensive two-week program that helps integrate veterans to university life.
“It helped me survive,” said Caudill, who graduated in May with a bachelor’s degree in history and is now pursuing a master’s degree at ECU.
“The boot camp helps you mentally prepare for adversity… and it helps you build a corps of people who can help you whenever you’re having problems,” he added. “It operates like a lot of the organizations you have on campus for the traditional students, where it’s a place for them to come together with like-minded people to help each other out when they’re having problems.”
Caudill’s story is far too familiar.
“What we found is that the first semester of the first year can be particularly difficult for student veterans because they have families, they’re prone to feeling isolated, they’ve lost their military families and they don’t have someone telling them what to do every hour of every day,” said Dr. Anna Froula, an associate professor of film studies in ECU’s Thomas Harriot College of Arts and Sciences, who has been the director of the Veteran to Scholar program since its inception in 2017.
“They tend to outperform for the rest of the semesters, but the first semester can be really difficult for them and they can earn lower GPAs,” Froula added. “This program is meant to intervene in the difficulties of university life.”
After serving four years in the U.S. Army, Ashley Hunter graduated from ECU in May with three bachelor’s degrees and a 3.9 GPA. (Contributed photos)
After serving four years in the U.S. Army, including a deployment to Kuwait, Ashley Hunter was worried about getting good enough grades and figuring out how to study, because she said she was not a great high school student.
The Veteran to Scholar Boot Camp changed that.
“When I came to the program it gave me a lot of confidence, because I started realizing that what we’re doing here is what I like to do – reading and analyzing and having group discussions – so I thought, ‘I’m going to be OK,’” said Hunter, who was born in Greenville while her father, Robert, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran, was a medical student at the Brody School of Medicine.
Hunter graduated in May with a 3.9 GPA and three bachelor’s degrees in anthropology, history and classical civilization. She was a member of two honor societies – Phi Kappa Phi and Phi Alpha Theta – and was awarded Phi Kappa Phi’s “Outstanding Senior Award” for 2019-2020. She is taking varying levels of four different language courses this semester – Latin, Greek, German and French – to help her be more competitive as she seeks a PhD.
“I think the boot camp mainly gave me the confidence that I needed,” Hunter said. “It made me realize that this is what I want to do, and I can do it.”
The Veteran to Scholar Boot Camp has successfully integrated dozens of other veterans to university life, but this year marked a new era for the program, which is currently funded through a two-year grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Not only was the typically in-person program held exclusively online due to the COVID-19 pandemic, non-veteran medical and pre-med students were also included in the program for the first time.
“It is a great opportunity for our medical students. They will be providing care for veterans at some point and understanding where their patients are coming from is so important to providing good medical care,” said Dr. Sheena Eagan, assistant professor in the Department of Bioethics and Interdisciplinary Studies at ECU’s Brody School of Medicine, who joined Froula as a co-director of the program this year.
Froula said including the medical students in the program will give them a better understanding of how veterans tend to have a lot of health issues that are normally seen in older populations, such as hearing loss and back issues, and also a better understanding of the discourse around post-traumatic stress and traumatic brain injury.
“This will also allow the student veterans an opportunity to vocalize to future medical professionals about what the unique needs of our veterans are and help shape the field of medicine surrounding veteran issues,” Froula said.
Participants took part in ECU’s Veteran to Scholar Boot Camp virtually this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. (Contributed photo)
Including the medical students in the program could also help make veterans more comfortable with their future civilian health care providers.
“We have seen that veterans are more likely to delay care because they are coming from a culture in the military where asking for help is almost seen as a form of weakness,” Eagan said. “Beyond that, functioning in the military and engaging with military medicine has been shown to undermine trust in the medical profession just because of that weirdness of physicians also being higher ranking officers. This will introduce medical students to that reality.”
The Veteran to Scholar Boot Camp was an ideal opportunity for collaboration between ECU’s Main and Health Sciences campuses. As of 2019, more than half (54%) of the Brody School of Medicine’s alumni were practicing in North Carolina and more than half (51%) of those graduates were in primary care practice.
“In North Carolina, we have a very large veteran population of more than 775,000 and we also have over 100,000 active duty service members, which means that our graduates will end up providing a lot of care to veterans, military service members and their families,” Eagan said. “This boot camp will give those medical and pre-med students the opportunity to engage with veterans before they graduate, learn more about how military service effects health care and health status, and allow them to provide more culturally competent care to this vulnerable population here in eastern North Carolina.”