Chez Center hosts program to ready veterans for higher ed
By ETHAN SIMMONS
While Adam Sherman Jr. sat for the two-hour bus ride from Chicago O’Hare Airport to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus, a pit was forming in his stomach.
He’d spent six years in the Navy, stationed in Japan and California for three years apiece, sometimes working out at sea for six or 12 months at a time. But a few preparatory problem sets for the Warrior-Scholar Project’s academic boot camp had him stumped.
“I didn’t know if I’d be able to knock off the dust and the rust to get going in this program,” said Sherman, who grew up in New Jersey.
After spending four days in the camp absorbing astronomy and physics lectures from University of Illinois faculty at the Chez Veterans Center, Sherman’s first taste of higher education was going “really smooth,” he said.
“They broke it down in a way that’s really digestible, and they’re building it up in a way where it’s really fast-paced, but it’s comprehensible,” he said.
This July, 15 student Veterans took classes and teamed up on projects in the Chez Veterans Center, the University of Illinois’ one-stop shop for military-connected students. The center has hosted the nonprofit Warrior-Scholar Project for the three consecutive years.
The Warrior-Scholar Project, or WSP for short, takes place in college campuses across the country as an eight-day higher ed experience for military Veterans of all ages.
The WSP and Chez Veterans Center’s missions are aligned—both are dedicated to easing the transition of military-connected students back into education and civilian life.
“The premise of WSP is really about showing them they can do it, giving them the confidence they can leave the military and go to a place like the University of Illinois,” said Chez Veterans Center Director of Operations Andy Bender.
“I think what’s great for us in particular is (WSP) follows our mission. We’re all about the successful transition from the military into higher education—this is a good steppingstone for it. But it also gets a lot of our campus partners who may not have connections to the military to come and meet these students.”
WSP Education Programs Coordinator Rebecca Mills called Illinois’ Chez Veterans Center one of the program’s “top campus stakeholders,” for going “above and beyond” for student cohorts. A core component for both organizations: Showing Veterans that the talents they’ve built in the service are transferable to the classroom.
“It’s less the content—we know they’re capable, we know they have the experience. But how do they use the skills they developed in the military to be successful in higher ed?” Mills said.
Some students, such as Sherman, enter the Warrior-Scholar Project with no college credits. Others, such as Sergio Perez Jr., a 26-year-old Marine Corps veteran from Oklahoma, used WSP to re-familiarize himself with the pace of university life.
When he left the service in October 2023, he “had one goal in mind: and that was to go back and finish my degree,” he said.
“For me, WSP was a ‘two birds with one stone’ type of deal, because University of Illinois was actually one of the schools I’m thinking about applying to in the future,” Perez added. “When I saw they still had openings for this, I thought, ‘You know what? I can do a quick campus tour while still self improving.’ So this has given me a better understanding of how this campus functions.”
A whopping 88 percent of Warrior-Scholar Project alumni have either obtained a college degree or are on track to complete one, according to their internal statistics. This year, Illinois also hosted WSP’s annual alumni conference, where bootcamp graduates return to network and listen to industry professionals with military connections.
A Veteran careers panel discussion included Mona Dexter, Comcast's vice president of Military and Veteran Affairs; Michael Pett, Uber’s head of Military and Veteran Programs at Uber; Erica Jeffries Purdo, vice president of Strategy and Operations at Johnson & Johnson; and Tommy Jones, senior director of Military and Talent Programs at Walmart.
During the campus visit, the student cohort got to tour Research Park businesses such as Caterpillar’s Innovation Center and Hourglass Medical, a wearable technology company. Before they left campus, Chez staff brought them to a celebratory visit to the Colonnades Club in Memorial Stadium, itself a tribute to U. of I. veterans who fought in World War I.
“Illinois might be one of the best-kept secrets in higher ed; You walk into a building and learn about a Nobel prize winner who invented something you use every day,” Bender said. “We’ve had a couple people who’ve told us, ‘I wanna come here.’”