Graduating veterans were joined by their families, peers and supporters at the 2024 Student Veteran Graduation celebration on December 9, 2024. Trevor Foote, a newly awarded Ph.D. in Astronomy and Space Science from the Department of Astronomy at Cornell University, delivered a motivating speech at the celebration, transcribed below, about applying the lessons he learned in the military to his student experience at Cornell.
Lessons learned from military service
For those who don’t know me, my name is Trevor Foote and as of this past month, I am now a bona fide doctor of astronomy. Now, if you had told me a decade ago that I’d be here today, I would have thought you were crazy. I would point back to the third year into my first bachelor’s degree where I decided to change from pre-med to engineering because the thought of all the schooling still ahead of me to become a doctor was too daunting.
I want to share how my military service shaped my return to education, provided me the tools to be confident that I could achieve a doctorate, and hopefully pass on some lessons I’ve learned along the way.
In what seems like a lifetime ago, I served as an Engineering Officer in the United States Army. While serving, my most rewarding position was as the platoon leader for a horizontal engineering platoon that was part of a Sapper company. We were part of a brand-new Army organization design meant to expedite route clearance missions.
All this is to say that when my first job after training was to stand up a brand-new platoon, I was operating in uncharted territory. This exact situation may not have happened to you, but I can almost guarantee that at some point in their military service, everyone here similarly faced a situation that placed you far outside your expertise and comfort zone.
For me, this was particularly unsettling because I’d always sort of played it safe. Sure, as a first-generation college student I ventured into unknown lands of academia, but when things got too far from my comfort zone I fell back onto a major I knew well. My father has been in construction his whole life; I was raised on construction sites and saved money for college by working construction every school break. Civil engineering was safe and familiar.
Now as an officer, I was in a situation I couldn’t easily switch out of, and it forced me to reconcile with a few of my weaknesses. The first was learning to be vulnerable and sometimes rely on others for help. During my first undergrad, I never went to a single office hour and only worked on homework in groups if it was necessary, like for a group project. To do otherwise was to admit I might need help. This also played into a common insecurity most in academia experience at some point, which is impostor syndrome; thinking you’re somehow the only one not supposed to be here and, eventually, you’re going to slip up and be found out.
As a newly minted LT, I didn’t want my NCOs to know I knew practically nothing. Instead, I tried to outwork my ignorance, working endlessly to learn what I needed through Army manuals and such. But no matter how much time I spent trying to learn, I found myself falling farther behind in my duties. It finally took my company commander calling me to the red carpet for me to realize something had to change. After that, I began meeting with my company commander regularly before PT, and in my next meeting with my NCOs, I did the impossible — I admitted I needed help.
Of course, in true NCO fashion, this butter bar got a lot of flack — but it was good-hearted and support came with it. I suddenly wasn’t having to chase down the manuals for every tool and piece of equipment we had, because, shocker, the NCOs already had most of them from their previous units. Also, during my new tag ups with my company commander, where we focused on aligning training with my platoon’s Mission Essential Task Lists, I realized that we all, at some point, are living the adage “Fake it ’till you make it.” It became evident that this double-tabbed Ranger/Sapper, who I thought knew everything about the Army, didn’t know much about the needs of an earthmoving platoon. Instead, he used his network of other company commanders that had horizontal engineers to help us draft a training plan.
In fact, as I found out during my service, the military seems to be particularly good at allowing us to be in a position just long enough to start feeling like we know what’s going on and stop feeling like a fake before it rips us out of that unit or position and place us in a whole new unknown.
As I was transitioning out of the military, I, like most, faced it with some amount of trepidation, but also with excitement. Through my many experiences in the military, I learned that:
- The unknown was never as scary as I played it out in my mind, and
- I always came out the other side and stronger for it, so rather than fearing it as I had before, I now looked forward to it.
Without this newfound confidence, I doubt I ever would have made the leap back into academia to pursue my dream of working at NASA.
Leveraging lessons to enhance the student experience
Looking back and comparing my undergrad experiences before and after my military service, I was a completely different student. Changes in my approach made me far more successful.
For example, rather than working alone, I organized study groups and, whether I needed help in the class at the time or not, I showed up — even if I was just helping others. If you truly want to test whether you understand a concept, try and teach it to someone else. You’ll quickly find out your own level of understanding.
I also attended many office hours. In fact, I’m almost certain a few professors were setting their clocks by when I would show up and knock on their door. And looking back, it was dumb not to. It’s not a sign of weakness, as I had once thought; it’s utilizing a resource meant to help you excel. Here’s a pro tip regarding office hours: if you find yourself in a class you really like, be strategic with them. When there’s a lull in homework and the office hour is likely to be unused, that’s a great time to get one-on-one time with an expert on that subject. Use that time to pick their brain about what a career in that field looks like, if there are there opportunities to do research with them, or learn something more advanced than the course has time to teach. Most professors love to talk about their research and their field, so leverage that to your benefit.
Outside of classes, I also took on leadership positions in student organizations. This allowed me broaden my social network while doing something I am really passionate about: mentoring. I was able to take the leadership skills I gained from the Army and teach them to others.
During my time as a grad student here at Cornell, these approaches remained useful, though in practice were applied differently. When you’re doing cutting-edge research, there is no magic office hour with an expert who has an answer just waiting for you. What I found helpful was meeting with as many people in my field as possible. If you have a guest lecturer giving a colloquium or talk, sign up to meet with them, even if it’s just to ask about their research and approaches to problems. You may just find an ‘aha’ moment for your own research buried in a discussion that seems very distant from your work. You also never know which connection will lead to your next job or project opportunity, so the more connections you make, the better your chances of finding future success.
One thing that didn’t change from undergrad to grad was my participation in leadership positions for student organizations, from being president of the Astronomy department’s graduate student group, where I advocated for the grad’s needs to department leadership, to helping found and serve as the vice president of the growing Graduate Veteran Student Association. These positions allowed me to hone interpersonal skills that can otherwise wither in disuse during grad school while also finding community, which can often be a challenge during grad school.
So, for those of us graduating and getting ready to move on to the next stages of our lives, lets embrace the unknown coming our way and venture forth with hope and excitement of the things to come.
For those remaining, still working towards this day, if there’s one piece of advice you take away from this, I hope that it’s to not be afraid to ask for help. The secret is: none of us know everything. Some of us are just better at faking it until we figure it out.
About Trevor Foote
Before pursuing his doctoral degree, Trevor earned two bachelor’s degrees: a B.S. in Civil Engineering in 2011 and a B.S. in Astrophysics in 2019. Following his first degree, he served as an Engineering Officer in the U.S. Army, leading a platoon of horizontal engineers. After completing his military service, he worked as a project engineer for a construction company, further honing his technical and leadership skills before returning to academia to pursue his dream of working for NASA where he hopes to help design and test the next generation of space telescopes.
