Abby Swisher recently graduated in 2023 from Geneva College’s Master of Arts in Higher Education program. During her time in the program, she decided she would research how veterans adjust to college life as her final capstone project. Abby was a military dependent herself and wanted to use her research to help other people like her. Below is a summary Abby wrote describing her research and her findings.

I was asked to write a brief description of my capstone project for my Master of Arts in Higher Education and Student Development (MAHE). As I thought about what inspired my project I was taken back to my first couple of weeks as a Graduate Assistant at Geneva. I remember hearing about the SVA club- the Student Veterans Association and I remember attending the first meeting and being in awe of all the dependents (children of military parents), active duty, and retired members sitting in the same room as me. As a dependent myself, my father having served 40 years in the Army, I had spent my fair share of time on bases with other military members but at that moment I felt at home.

This meeting inspired me to reflect on my own time as a dependent and to process what it might look like to be an active-duty military member and return to a college campus. With a big research project for the end of my MAHE program, I figured this would be the perfect opportunity to research this group of students.

Thus began my research on veterans and academic transitions. I chose this topic because of my past background as a dependent and being around other veterans all my life. I also chose this topic because in talking with some veterans at Geneva, I found that they were struggling with the transition to college life, and that these students had a difficult time because of several factors, including age gap, life experience, and mental health factors.

I wanted to get at the heart of whether students were thriving or not and specifically if these veterans were thriving. Other research showed that transitions are difficult but it did not fully look at whether veterans were thriving after the transition to college life. This is where my research came into play. Thus, my study was quantitative in nature and focused on Laurie Schreiner’s work with The “Thriving Quotient”: A New Vision for Student Success which looks at specific areas to see if students are actually thriving in college. Schreiner defines a thriving college student as someone who is fully engaged intellectually, socially, and emotionally. I was able to use her survey with graduate and adult students for my project.

I looked at eight specific areas in which these 131 veteran students from the survey may be thriving. They were asked a series of questions related to each of the eight areas of thriving that Schreiner defines for graduate and adult students. The students responded to the questions on a scale of 1-6. I then used SPSS a statistics software to run what is called Levene’s test for Equality of Variances. This test compares two groups to one another. In this case, it was non-veterans to veterans. I was looking for a specific number in this test to determine if the veteran students were thriving or not. Based on my previous research I was expecting that these students would not be thriving since the transition to college seemed so difficult. However, after my research, I determined that veteran students were actually thriving and were thriving specifically in the areas of spirituality.

I concluded with the idea that even though students may have a hard time transitioning to college, they seemed to be thriving after college specifically in the areas of spirituality. In future research, I would love to see how this plays out over time and if students thriving would continue throughout the whole time these students were in college. I would also love to do a study specifically on veterans and spirituality to better understand why these students were thriving in this specific area.

All in all, my experience with being a dependent as well as meeting the students of the SVA inspired me to do some further research on the topic. I loved getting to spend time with the veteran students on campus as a graduate student and I hope my research will inspire others to get to know why these students are so important!

-Abby Swisher MAHE '23