Justin Cole joined the Air Force right after high school, not because he saw college as a priority, but because he didn’t yet grasp its value. Nine years later, after volunteering in the aftermath of natural disasters and realizing the link between climate change and national security, he changed his mind. Now an MIT sophomore majoring in climate system science and engineering, Cole credits a weeklong STEM boot camp with helping him decide to pursue higher education. “It reaffirmed I wanted to get a bachelor’s,” he says. “It also inspired me to apply to MIT.”
The boot camp is part of the Warrior-Scholar Project (WSP), a nonprofit launched in 2012 to help service members transition to college. MIT joined WSP in 2017, offering a STEM-focused program that simulates a week of undergraduate life. Each day at MIT’s boot camp runs from 0845 to 2200, packed with problem sets, faculty lectures on math and physics, research projects, and tours of campus labs. Scholars also attend workshops on time management and applying to college. “It’s a lot like the MIT experience,” Cole says, recalling late nights grinding through assignments with peers.
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Michael McDonald, a physics professor at MIT’s Kavli Institute, and Navy veteran Nelson Olivier have led the program since its start. McDonald describes the scholars’ transformation: “By Tuesday, they’re miserable. By the end of the week, they’re like, ‘I could do another week.’” He credits their military background for their resilience. “They’ve already done this before,” he says. “They’re translating fixing radios or handling bombs into understanding Newton’s laws.”
For many scholars, meeting veterans who’ve made the academic leap is a turning point. WSP assigns alumni as “fellows” to mentor participants. Justin Cole recalls seeing alumni from Columbia, Princeton, and Harvard during his boot camp. “Just seeing people existing at these institutions made me realize, this is a thing that is doable,” he says. Aaron Kahler, a former Marine Corps operator who joined MIT in 2024, remembers a veteran PhD student showing him the neuroscience lab. “There were more successful vets than I thought,” he says.
Andrea Henshall, a retired Air Force major and PhD student in aeronautics, has helped mentor participants since joining the program. She’s impressed by how often scholars say, “I never considered MIT until the boot camp.” The program ends with a challenge coin designed by Olivier and McDonald. One side shows Newton’s laws of motion over the WSP logo. The other has MIT’s motto, “mens et manus,” (“mind and hand”), beneath an image of the Great Dome with the scholar’s name. “Earn your space on these buildings,” Olivier says. “Do something significant.”
For Kahler, the coin is a reminder of how the program changed his path. He keeps it on his desk at MIT, where he’s now a first-year student. “I don’t think I would be here if it weren’t for the Warrior-Scholar Project,” he says. The program’s impact is clear: 93% of scholars enroll in college within a year, and many go on to careers in engineering, science, and business. For veterans like Cole and Kahler, the boot camp was more than preparation—it was proof that they belonged.