Summer 2011 - University of Massachusetts Lowell

F E A T U R E S T O R Y
For Student
Veterans,a Long,
Less-Lonely Road
BY GEOFFREY DOUGLAS
With New Veterans Center, the University Honors its Returning Military
David Boyd is 29 years old, a UMass Lowell senior majoring in history. Not so
long ago, he was something else entirely: an Army intelligence analyst stationed
in South Korea, halfway between Seoul and the DMZ – and following
that, a counter-terrorism analyst based in Florida, deployed from there to
embassies and host nations around the globe.
He arrived on campus in the spring of 2008. His biggest challenge, he says, like that
of most of the 1,270 veterans on campus – and the thousands of others on campuses
around the United States – had little to do with academics:
“After being in Iraq, Afghanistan or wherever, and being used to a structured
lifestyle like the military, where you have to do things a certain way – or else – you
come into a school where the kids walk into class late, then sit there with their iPods
on, talking with friends or texting the entire time.”
His first months at school were lonely ones, he says: “I didn’t know any other
veterans. I felt out of place being in class with freshmen who were eighteen and
nineteen and away from their parents for the first time.”
A lot has changed in two years. Boyd, now president of the University’s Student
Veterans Organization (SVO) and state director for the Student Veterans of America
– as well as a member of the SALUTE veterans honors society and Phi Alpha Theta,
the History Department’s honor society – today spends a sizable block of his time
working to assure that other UMass Lowell veterans won’t have to suffer the same
alienation.
He was there on Veterans Day last November, in his capacity as SVO president, to
introduce the Chancellor in a flag-raising ceremony on campus that included U.S. Sen
Scott Brown, State Senator Steve Panagiotakos and others. It was at that ceremony
that Chancellor Meehan told the assembled crowd of the University’s newest
commitment to its veterans:
“We have committed space to create a combined veterans’ benefit office and dropin
center, with full-time and part-time staff, so that our student veterans can find the
resources they need and the support of other veterans on campus,” Meehan told the assembled
crowd. The center, which has also enjoyed the strong backing of U.S. Rep
Niki Tsongas, will be open by September of this year, according to the Chancellor.
For Boyd, the new center will be a milestone. “It will be a place any veterans on
campus can come and get information to assist them,” he predicts. “We’ll have people
there to help them and to show them what’s available, which is important, especially
since most veterans don’t know all the services available to them. It’ll be a huge step
toward making them feel comfortable here.”
“It’s going to be very important for the veterans on this campus,” says Oneida Blagg,
UMass Lowell’s director of Equal Opportunity and Outreach, and herself a veteran of
the National Guard and Reserve. “Veterans today are dealing with any number of
mental or emotional issues – PTSD, rage, panic attacks, sexual trauma. The military
Continued
A ceremonial flag-raising was held on campus
in November in honor of Veterans Day.
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