Warrior-Scholar Project: Answering the call of military service and college

Rey Villaseñor recently dashed up the stairs at the Yale School of Management like he owned the place — which is a good sign the Warrior-Scholar Project (WSP) is accomplishing its mission of helping veterans make a smooth transition to college life.

Villaseñor, a six-year U.S. Air Force veteran from San Jose, California, was heading into a late afternoon seminar to prepare for his end-of-the-week business case study presentation. His day had been filled up to that point with classes, group meetings, and a tour of the Peabody Museum. The case study seminar was his last big commitment before heading to dinner in the Silliman College dining hall.

As with everything else he did during the WSP bootcamp at Yale, held over a week in June, Villaseñor brought a keen eye, a confident spirit, and a damn fine pair of cowboy boots to the proceedings. By the end of the week, he seemed just as comfortable navigating the Yale campus as he was maintaining the avionics systems of a B-52 bomber.

“The Warrior-Scholar Project has been so refreshing for me,” said Villaseñor, who has been studying at De Anza College in Cupertino, Calif. “You don’t realize what you need sometimes until you see it.”

WSP — founded at Yale in 2011 by alumni Christopher Howell ’14, Jesse Reising ’11, and Nick Rugoff ’11 — is running college preparatory boot camps at 20 university and college campuses around the country this summer. Since its creation, nearly 3,000 student veterans have participated in one of its free WSP boot camps or workshops.

This year at Yale, WSP organized three boot camps — a college readiness camp, a business-oriented camp, and an all-women STEM camp — which brought 35 veteran-scholars to campus, including Villaseñor.

During the boot camp, participants complete more than 75 academic hours, simulating a typical college finals week. The idea is to build the veterans’ confidence by sharpening their academic skills in a campus environment.

“The Warrior-Scholar Project is designed to help veterans recognize their own capacity to thrive in university life,” said Marla Geha, a professor of astronomy and physics in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Science and a board member of WSP. “The intensity of the week allows for honest conversations, where students will actually believe me when I say they are capable of succeeding in a Yale classroom.”

This was Villaseñor’s second WSP bootcamp; he attended his first a year ago at Brown University.

It has been a life-changing experience, he said.

“I joined the military because I needed structure,” he explained. “In high school, I wasn’t as disciplined as I needed to be, and I didn’t have many options. In a way, I think the military raised me.”

During his years in the Air Force, stationed in Minot, North Dakota, Villaseñor learned to embrace self-discipline and personal responsibility. He strived to be the first person on the job each day and perform his duties — which included the care and maintenance of communications, navigation, and weapons integration systems for large aircraft — with excellence.

He also served in Qatar during Operation Allies Refuge in 2021, aiding humanitarian efforts to evacuate and resettle Afghan refugees.

Yet like many veterans who enroll in college after their military service, Villaseñor found the adjustment to be jarring. He’d taken a year off after his service to reset mentally and enjoy his freedom — a freedom he describes now as “a catch-22,” the classic no-win scenario. “I finally had my time back, but I’d lost the team and the mission that gave it meaning,” he said. “It was isolating in a way I didn’t expect.”

And so, he started taking classes at De Anza College.

“I’d realized by then that the military had given me a sense of belonging and purpose,” he said. “Without it, I felt stagnant. So, I had this plan to prove myself in the first year of college by being strictly academically focused.

“I treated that first year like a checkpoint: Go to class, keep my head down, get the grades, transfer. I was passing through, focused on what I could do for myself instead of what I could build for others. That’s why my first WSP boot camp meant so much. For the first time since separating, I was surrounded by my military community again,” he said.

Did his plan work? Yes and no. He was academically successful, but he felt he still wasn’t fulfilling his true potential. That would come after experiencing his first WSP bootcamp.

“Walking into a room full of veterans, where everyone has a goal they’re trying to achieve — I understood immediately that this is my community,” he said.

Villaseñor returned to school with a new mission: Combining his academics and his rapport with other vets. He became a VA work-study student employee at De Anza’s Veterans Resource Center, helping military-connected students through the same transition from military service back to school that he struggled with.

That work led him to create the Veteran Scholar Society — De Anza’s only student-led veterans organization — and the group’s “Lunch & Learn” workshop series, bringing to campus veteran-focused career guidance, internship insight, and personal mentorship from Fortune 500 executives in Silicon Valley.

One of those relationships, with Micron Technology, grew into an ongoing partnership that includes internship referrals for the veteran community and continued workshops preparing veteran students in engineering, tech, and business for internship opportunities inside the company. Villaseñor is working with De Anza and Micron to formalize the partnership into an official pipeline for the college’s veteran students.

At Yale, during his second tour with WSP, he joined the business bootcamp. He and a dozen other vets worked with case study leader Ben Martin, a Yale M.B.A. student and a former U.S. Army pilot, to review details of a pair of catastrophic Boeing 737 MAX aircraft crashes, in 2018 and 2019, that killed a total of 346 people.

Later in the week, Villaseñor and his classmates would give analytical presentations on factors that led to the crashes, as well as the responses to the incidents. For now, they would spend the next hour discussing everything from chain-of-command issues to aircraft systems to business ethics.

It’s the sort of analysis Villaseñor expects will be helpful come autumn, when he continues his studies at the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

“I came back to WSP to inspire others the same way this community inspired me a year ago,” he said. “Everything I’ve learned since my first boot camp, I wanted to pass on to someone in the same shoes I was in, and to prove that what may look like an impossible goal is actually within reach.”