Veteran resource center opens on campus

The military and veteran resource center opened on November 28th of last year. The veteran’s center, as a part of the Division of Academic and Student Affairs, is a special site for students who are connected to the military to get information about campus and community resources.

“Our role is to help connect our military affiliated students to resources on campus,” said Nicholas Drake, director of military and veteran’s services at NC State. “All of the great things that we have [such as] our career development center, counseling center, student health center, academic advising- we connect our veterans to all of those great services.”

The veteran’s center helps to educate student veterans to the many opportunities available at NC State and programs provided by organizations such as the United States Department of Veteran’s Affairs (VA) and Hire Heroes USA, a non-profit organization that specializes in getting veterans jobs after they leave the military.

“The VA Education benefits are some of the big things that we handle,” Drake said. “Once the applications are processed through the VA, [we] can check on status a lot easier than a student can. Once the benefits are processed [we] make sure that they get here in a timely manner and are getting paid out to the student.”

Dakota Lowery, a graduate student and veteran studying Geospatial Information, Science and Technology, said that if “I had a question, I’d come to [Drake] about it, and he’d point me in the right direction. Some students in the past with a question about, say, finance had gone to a couple places and it could be very confusing and frustrating. I got very lucky that when I came here, I got linked in with the right people and didn’t have that issue.”

Many complaints have been raised within the last few years about inefficiencies at the VA and other organizations that aim to help veterans.

“We just want to be there to mitigate all of those issues for future students,” Lowery said.

The veteran’s center is open to any NC State student that is affiliated with the United States military.

Those that seek services include “student veterans here at the university, anyone that would fall under the realm of dependant, such as spouses, children, even faculty, staff and alumni would be able to utilize the services,” Drake said. “We like to do alumni engagement and things like that for mentorship programs and to tie them back into [the university]. We’re not here to service all veterans, but if a [non-NC State] veteran came through the door, we would help direct them to the right resource.”

There are about 2,200 military-affiliated students at NC State.

“Roughly 600 are self-identified as veterans,” Drake said. “We have another 1,600 that identify as military dependants.”

A big aim of the new veteran’s center it to transition veterans back to civilian life by connecting them to the NC State community.

“We had our open house for student veterans, faculty and staff that came through,” Lowrey said. I think [the veteran’s center] is going to be a nice space where student veterans can come to relax, hang out and share old stories about their time in service.”

The veteran’s center is on the first floor of Witherspoon student center.

“We have an office space and a social gathering area that students can take advantage of,” Drake said.

Lowrey indicated that he would definitely recommend the veteran’s center to any military-affiliated student reading this.

“Come in get some information and just hang out and use the space we have for you to use,” Lowrey said.

Anyone interested in learning more about the veteran’s center can visit the website at https://registrar.ncsu.edu/veterans/  or send in an email to veterans-ed@ncsu.edu