Veterans, Tell Your Story!
The NY Times recently featured an article on Columbia University’s efforts recruiting veterans. As we at service2school already know, they found veterans to be very impressive applicants. The article does a great job highlighting the strengths veterans have as well as the key struggles they face in applying to school. Veterans have leadership skills, great communication abilities, and unparalleled life experience. The problem? Vets are hesitant to tell their story.
In the military, service members are trained to be humble, to put the team first, and to hold selfless service in the highest regard. Vets can feel that telling their story is contrary to those deeply honored and ingrained values. But when it comes to interviews and essays for admittance into school, this is simply not true. Service members can still be humble and talk or write about how much they have achieved.
For example, a common mission for veterans in Iraq or Afghanistan is to find and destroy enemy caches. To successfully accomplish this type of mission they used a plethora of skills easily discussed in an admission essay or interview. For business schools, a mission like destroying enemy caches could prove veterans’ problem solving skills, analytical capacity, and communication ability. To find that cache the service member either had to work cross-functionally with intelligence officers, gather the intelligence themselves through local sources, or analyze terrain to notice something was out of place. Once found, the veteran would have had to figure out the best way to either destroy the cache or gather the material and send it to higher for further analysis. This type of decision involves many layers of problem solving in order to determine the best course of action. Finally, through the whole process, the vet was probably on a radio communicating both up and down the chain of command to ensure everyone who needed to know did. In the end, they likely gathered valuable intelligence or destroyed several pounds of ordnance that would have been used to hurt others.
Every veteran has countless examples like the one above that they can use in admissions interview. There is nothing braggadocios about thinking through a situation and finding applicable skills, but vets may feel that they are trying to outshine their peers or are somehow not giving their team enough credit. Of course, when it comes to admissions interviews this feeling is misguided. When a veteran takes real-world examples of leadership and pairs them with the holistic reasons they decided to serve the combination forms a compelling story that admissions officers love. If you are a veteran and would like help telling your story, please sign up!
