(Tribune News Service) — William & Mary hosted a humanities boot camp last week through the Warrior-Scholar Project, which offers accelerated college courses to enlisted veterans and service members transitioning into college.

The boot camps, which began in 2012, provide weeklong courses focused on STEM — science, technology, engineering and math — business or humanities.

William & Mary has been working with a military nonprofit for the past four years.

Camps provide participants with college success workshops, lectures, research projects, tutoring and more. Including William & Mary, the program partnered with 19 different schools this summer, said Rebekah Bien-Aine, a Warrior-Scholar Project fellow. She said the camp’s goal is to help students learn and discover how they learn and what works for them before settling into a higher education setting.

“It’s a little more in-depth than just writing an essay,” Bien-Aine said.

Jay Jolles, assistant director for William & Mary’s Writing and Communications Center, said the humanities boot camp takes a 16-week freshman communication class and distills it into four days. The week ended with students writing a three-to-five page paper focused on American democracy.

Two texts were given to participants to study for their thesis papers, he said: a set of historical documents by Alexis de Tocqueville and an academic monograph by Daniel Allen.

Robert Kissell and Rafael Doolittle were two of the boot camp’s six participants. Kissell, a New York resident raised in Virginia, served nearly six years in the U.S. Air Force. After suffering an injury in 2018, the 29-year-old staff sergeant was medicinally discharged. After his departure from the military, he found he had “no real direction,” but was encouraged by his family to give college a try despite not feeling confident in himself.

The Warrior-Scholar Project was presented to him while studying for his associate degree at Hudson Valley Community College in Troy, N.Y. Participants who complete the boot camp become part of the Warrior-Scholar Project alumni, which leads to an opportunity to become a Warrior-Scholar Project fellow. Kissell said becoming a fellow is one of his goals.

Essentially, he said, he wants to “be a guide to veterans who are kind of considering going back to college, or are already in college, or still in that transition period of getting out of the military and trying to find a path that suits them the most.”

Boot camp days ran from 7:25 a.m. to about 10 p.m. and included multiple two-hour classes running throughout the day, with meals in between. With the humanities boot camp, literary professors and tutors assisted students in writing papers in preparation for college level writing.

Doolittle, from Dallas, Texas, served four years in the U.S. Air Force as a senior airman. Prior to the Air Force, he attended Centenary College of Louisiana. After the Air Force, the 32-year-old attended Dallas College, where he noticed the program at his veterans center.

“I was like, I might as well check this one out, since it’s my weakness,” Doolittle said. “It’s a very strong writing program here, too.”

Kissell and Doolittle both said their studies are doing well. While he struggled as a high school student, Kissell said being in the military allowed him to take his first steps toward college. In the coming weeks, he’s moving to Poughkeepsie, N.Y., to start Vassar College, where he plans to double major in psychology and sociology while focusing on social work and child psychology relating to traumatic experiences.

For Doolittle, he said he’s leaning into either a business or law degree, and possibly studying cybersecurity or nursing. He said he’s looking at William & Mary due to its “really good law and business program.”

For more information on the Warrior-Scholar Project, visit warrior-scholar.org.

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