Empowering Veterans for Success: Warrior-Scholar Project

Transitioning to civilian life after years of military service can be daunting. Some veterans pursue higher education, while others explore business and entrepreneurship, each journey uniquely personal. What remains constant is the importance of ensuring service members are well-prepared for this transition. 

 

In this special episode of The Unshakeables, Ben sits down with Ryan Pavel, a veteran and CEO of the national nonprofit Warrior-Scholar Project, to discuss his transition from the military. Ryan shares how the discipline and determination he developed during his service helped him achieve his dream job: guiding and preparing other veterans for a fulfilling life after service. 

 

Additionally, Ben is joined by Mark Elliott, Managing Director and Global Head of Military and Veterans Affairs at JPMorgan Chase, who offers his insights on why veterans often become exceptional leaders and passionate entrepreneurs

 

The Unshakeables is brought to you by Chase for Business and Ruby Studio by iHeartMedia

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Ben:After years of work, Ryan Pavel had finally landed his dream job with the Warrior-Scholar project. He was a military veteran turned lawyer who dreamed of working with other veterans. The Warrior-Scholar project had just received a huge grant that would allow them to bring him on as executive director. But right before he was supposed to begin, his boss suddenly left the organization. Ryan:So I came on board and I had this really small team of people who believed in the thing, like a few people, and we had enough money in the bank to be able to pay the bills, but the organization's sustainability really depended on that grant. I didn't realize how much depended on it until I actually got a look at the full on financials. I also didn't realize that we were only in phase one of this big grant application.Ben:Okay, let me just make sure I have this right. You come on board on spec, you don't know how on spec it is. You desperately need this grant way more than you realize you desperately need this grant. And it's a little further away than you sort of were led to believe.Ryan:Yeah, yeah, shit. Right?Ben:Yeah.Welcome to The Unshakeables, from Chase for Business and Ruby Studio from iHeartMedia. I'm Ben Walter, CEO of Chase for Business. On The Unshakeables, we're sharing the daring stories of small business owners facing their crisis points and telling the stories of how they got through it. And today I want to introduce you to someone special who will be joining us on this episode. Mark Elliott is Managing Director and Global Head of Military and Veterans Affairs for JPMorgan Chase, where I work. And we're excited to have him join us today.Hi Mark. Welcome to the show.Mark:Ben, thank you for having me and thank you for hosting this. I think this is important for not just the veteran community, but the entire small business community.Ben:We're fortunate enough to be colleagues, but JPMorgan Chase is a really big place. So why don't you tell everyone what it is you do for the firm.Mark:I do lead our military and veteran affairs here at JPMorgan Chase, and I pinch myself every day just to know that I get to do this. It's a way to give back to a community that I spent 28 years serving alongside.Ben:So Mark, hopefully you know what our show is all about, and I think you've heard a couple of episodes. But I wanted to have you join us today because you are a veteran and just like Ryan, you work with veterans all the time as they transition from military life into civilian life.Mark:Well, Ben, thank you for shedding a light on this community. I think they are a treasure that we should be proud of and make sure we're helping them be successful.Ben:On today's episode, the Warrior-Scholar Project from Washington, D.C.So first of all, I just want to say in front of everyone, I want to say thank you for your service.Ryan:Thank you so much for your support. It's actually really interesting, even that question about how veterans respond to that question of thank you for your service. That's really topical in the veteran community. There's a school of people that really reject that as like something that people don't like being thanked for their service. There's a whole lot of conversation about it, and it took me years before I heard somebody else say that.Ben:Well, I'm sorry if I offended you.Ryan:You didn't at all. No. But put to that point, right? That my response to that is actually what I found that is the most comfortable that you say thank you for your service, and then I always respond, thank you for your support.Ben:Ryan, as you'll hear throughout this episode, has a complicated relationship with the military. But one thing is crystal clear, his support for veterans is unwavering. To understand how Ryan got to the Warrior-Scholar project, we have to go back to the beginning.Ryan:I grew up in a upper middle class suburb, very privileged upbringing, only child. Very, very fortunate in that regard. And since I grew up outside Chicago, the school everybody wanted to go to was University of Illinois, and I got rejected. And rightly so, I was not a particularly compelling candidate. I was not achieving my potential. My extracurriculars were track and cross country and getting last in a lot of those races.Ben:After that rejection, he didn't know where to turn. Then he spoke with a recruiter from the Marine Corps.Ryan:Some things clicked for me. The path that I thought that I was going to do, the path that seemed easy is not the path that I'm actually going to follow of just going to school and taking a major and studying something for the sake of studying something. It seemed like a really good way to be able to wipe the slate clean, at least at the junior ranks, the military, it's a true meritocracy. All that matters is can you do this number of pull-ups, doesn't matter where you came from or anything else like that. I liked that a lot. Service of country and a lot of pride. Something that I could take a lot of pride and ownership over.Ben:So Ryan joined up. He went to basic training and took a series of aptitude tests to see what career he would be best suited for. His testing indicated he would excel in languages, so he set out learning Arabic.Ryan:All day every day, you're learning from native speakers.Ben:It's a tough language too. It's not a Roman alphabet, the whole thing.Ryan:Right. And you're not just a college student either, right? Like the Marine Corps still owns you, right? And so you are doing all the formations and all the training for the Marine Corps, but then your job is really to be able to actually learn that language.Ben:And how'd that go?Ryan:Well, ups and downs, right? It was not a particularly easy language for me to learn. And so I needed some additional tutoring, and I ended up doing okay. But the thing about it is that all that matters is one test at the end. That's it. But you have to hit a certain line and you can either be a linguist or you can't. And I failed. Basically, everybody around me passed it, and so it's sort of this series of failures. It's like, okay, well, I'm 17 years old. I get rejected, you know why. Like, okay, well now I'm going to be an Arabic linguist. I tell everybody I'm going to be an Arabic for a year and a half between boot camp and all these things, but I'm moving towards this thing and I take this test. Well, wait, now I failed this thing too.Ben:Ryan was given an option. He could either find another specialty, or he could double down, work harder and retake the test in eight weeks. Ryan decided to focus and go for it.Ryan:I learned probably more Arabic in those eight weeks than in the rest of the 63 weeks combined. And so I took it again and I passed. And so then I was able to leave that duty station, went to North Carolina, and I went back and forth to Iraq from there a couple of times between 2009, 2010.Ben:During his time in the military, Ryan worked as an Arabic translator.Ryan:You are working in a secure environment and you are translating whatever comes across your desk. We lived in a bunker, just kind of buried into a dune on the side of a base. I worked the night shift, so it was 12 hours on, 12 hours off for seven months, for seven days a week. So you get kind of weird, right?Ben:Yeah. I mean, imagine.Ryan:Like the folks that you're with, like you get real close in real weird ways. We were attached to an infantry unit and a human intelligence unit.Ben:He wasn't only in the bunker though. On his second tour, he went out into the field.Ryan:A lot of my memories from Iraq are those ones when we were out in the field and actually translating and being people from the communities. I grew up a lot like just being able to be around different cultures effectively kicked me into high gear, in a way that I was not feeling when I was 17.Ben:At that point, Ryan had been in for five years, but he had never stopped wanting to go to school.Ryan:Two thirds of enlisted service members are first gen college students. And so I was in the minority that I was not a first gen college student, which means that I had this familial support to be able to say, hey, like college is a thing that you should be doing. But there still are these challenges in terms of what that transition can look like for me.Ben:So I'm sure many of you have heard of the GI Bill, which was first introduced after World War Two, and provided veterans with a host of benefits. One of the best known being tuition coverage for a service member looking to attend college or a vocational school. What we have now is a little different, and it was passed in 2008. This bill, the one Ryan would have access to, covered the cost of tuition for any university in the veteran's home state. One critique about the implementation of that bill is that there's low awareness among service members about the options that are available to them as they transition out of the military. Many veterans end up going to the college or university that advertises the most to them, rather than the institution that might be the best fit for their academic goals and needs as a student. In 2010, Ryan was in the same boat. Unsure of where to turn, he did what millions of people do every day when they're looking for answers.Ryan:I went to Google and I typed in Arabic College and Veteran, and I applied to the schools that popped up. So not like the most sophisticated. University of Michigan popped up at top of that list. So many Arab Americans live in that area that they have a phenomenal Arabic program at University of Michigan. So I applied and was promptly rejected.Ryan:... University of Michigan. So I applied and was promptly rejected. Ben:It was The University of Illinois all over again, but unlike 17-year-old Ryan who pivoted, former Marine Ryan didn't back down.Ryan:I called the admissions office and said, "Hey, I was very interested in your institution. Could you give me any sort of input on what led to that rejection?" They connected me to somebody who had actually reviewed my application, and she was very blunt about it. She's like, "You've got some good things going for you, but you haven't shown you can be a good student," which is fair, right? Michigan requires people to be good students.Ben:Good to study, yeah.Ryan:Yeah.Ben:Ryan knew he could study. He'd shown himself that during his Arabic courses, so he enrolled at the community college near his base in North Carolina.Ryan:While I was still active duty in my last couple months, just whatever the classes were that were available, which is a really common path for a lot of veterans, using community college. It's one of the most underappreciated assets we have in this country. That's this whole separate podcast.Ben:I completely agree. Completely undervalued, underfunded, underappreciated, all across the board.Ryan:Absolutely, and I was able to transfer into University of Michigan. I was there for two years. Took as many courses as I possibly could to get my degree as quickly as I could, which is not the way that I advise veterans to go about getting an undergraduate degree.Ben:What's your degree in?Ryan:International relations.Ben:So Mark, this is usually the part in our story where we take a moment and talk about what we've just heard. When I first met Ryan, we were introduced, and I said, "It's nice to meet you. Thank you for your service," and he said, "Thank you for your support," and then we got into a discussion.And he said that there are a number of veterans who are very uncomfortable with the phrase, "Thank you for your service," and I just wanted to understand that a bit more. Because I've always felt, as a patriot, very proud to say thank you because I genuinely am grateful for people who make the sacrifice to serve our country. Where does that come from?Mark:Different veterans are going to feel different about that type of a thank-you. How that's manifested, I think, is really what Ryan was probably trying to say. How is that manifested in the actions of your organization, the actions of your community, the actions of you, maybe, as an individual? I think is where maybe the friction into that comes. I always say, "Thank you for your service is important to me, but let's see