Unique challenges for student Veterans

Jasmine:

The biggest thing for me is that I felt very out of place. I'm in a college environment, I'm working with kids that are my age but feeling like they're perceiving me as being this very hard Military girl and I was trying so hard to get out of that and I couldn't. No matter what I did seemed to change that about myself.

I would say that it made me definitely isolate more because especially being in class, you have people that don’t seem to… they take for granted the things that you no longer take for granted, i.e., being subordinate to your professor, being on time, doing things, just for the sake of getting them done.

It was just very hard to make friends at work because they never really seemed to be orderly. And I think the hardest thing with transitioning is that you want to be a civilian, you want to have the freedom, but then you also want to have that underlying structure, “Like these people don’t understand, like I’m on my scholarship, I’m on VA money, I’m here to like… my time is valuable, and so is theirs, why aren’t they doing it.” So, it made me incredibly frustrated. It made it very hard to enjoy school the first year and a half.

In tandem with going to the VA, I also was meeting with the Wellness Center at our school, a social worker, who referred me to a Vet Center that worked solely with Veterans and as a free service. And then also… So, I go see my Social Worker and then I’m medicated through the VA in which case I was prescribed medications, and then the Psychiatrist calls me once a month to see how I am doing.

I’ve been doing much better at trying to manage my symptoms and cope with them as they happen or even prevent them, and definitely the medication has been working and it helped me a lot with getting through school and finishing my degree, so.