Associate VP, Veterans Initiatives and Military Support, University of Maryland University College

My name's Keith Hawk, I'm the Associate Vice President for Veterans Initiatives and Military Support at UMUC. So what that means is, everything that we do in terms of non-academic programmatic support for veterans, everything from assistance in terms of mentoring, assistance in terms of things that support their academic pursuit, as well as certification of their VA benefits, I'm responsible for all that. And then on the military side, what I do is all of the programs that we have that interface with service portal systems, military service portal systems, that allow access to tuition assistance funding, I manage all of that, and then, we're also a member of Servicemen's Opportunity Colleges, that provides guaranteed transferability between institutions, I have a team that helps manage that process for us, as well, which supports service members. Periodically interact with students, one of the programs that we do have in terms of non-academic support, is we have a veterans center at our academic facility at Largo. Because we're a predominantly online institution, don't get as much foot traffic in there as, you know, some place like the University of Maryland at College Park, but we probably have 40 to 50 veterans per week that come in there. So I go down there several times per week for a couple hours just to sit there and, you know, chat with people, find out what their concerns are, what they're dealing with, and sometimes that gives us insights in terms of what it is we can do for 'em. So, during the week, you'll find me with career and alumni services, doing some sort of job fair, or hiring fair, you'll find me at those. You'll find me at virtual events, we do a lot of virtual events. We do three or four webinars per month, specific to veterans certification and veterans assistance, you can find me online at those. And then we will periodically do veterans-focused events either here at Adelphi or at one of our locations that we have in the DC or Maryland area, I'll be at all of those as well. The most recent one we did, was, we just held commencement in early May, we do an annual Military Appreciation Fair the Saturday prior to our commencement. Always get a big turnout at that, even though we're predominantly an online school, roughly 30%, 30 to 35% of our veteran population takes some kind of face-to-face class and most of them are here in the DC, Maryland, Northern Virginia area, we had a big turnout for that. So, you know, that's another type of event that we'll do throughout the course of the year.