Across the University of California’s 10 campuses, a quiet community of students shares a bond forged through military service. Some have traded uniforms for backpacks; others still wear both. Whether veterans or active duty servicemembers, these military-connected students bring a sense of discipline, purpose and camaraderie that shapes how they learn and lead at UC.
Meet a few of UC’s veteran and active-duty students and alumni; click the links below to jump to their stories.
Hanh Dinh, U.S. Marine Corps veteran, UC San Diego
Harwood Garland, U.S. Navy veteran, UC Irvine
Amanda Lassiter, U.S. Coast Guard Reserve, UC Irvine
Emily Li, U.S. Army Individual Ready Reserve, UC Riverside
Sebastian Smith, U.S. Air Force veteran, UC Davis
Angeliz Vargas Casillas, U.S. Air Force National Guard veteran, UC Riverside
Nate Wentland, U.S. Navy Reserve, UC Davis
Campus veterans centers
Hanh Dinh, U.S. Marine Corps veteran, UC San Diego
B.S., Cognitive Science, 2024
Undergraduate Student Veteran Program Director, Cornell University
First-generation college student
The daughter of Vietnamese immigrants, Hanh Dinh always knew she wanted to go to college, but didn’t see a way to pay for higher ed. Her two older brothers had tried community college, but dropped out. When one of her best friends joined the military, she followed suit, enlisting in the Marine Corps for four years with the goal of earning the GI Bill benefits that could finance her university education.
As an ammunition tech, Dinh was doing “Amazon, but for bullets” — logistical and supply chain work. Returning from Japan to California for her last year and a half of service, she enrolled in community college, determined to blaze a path into higher ed. That’s when one of her veteran friends asked her if she had heard of the Warrior-Scholar Project, an all-expenses-paid summer boot camp that familiarizes veterans with four-year universities and prepares them for top schools. It sounded too good to be true, but it wasn’t.
“When I left the military, I had a lot of self-doubt about going back into school,” says Dinh. Attending a bootcamp at Yale University after her first year of community college boosted her confidence, and she eventually transferred to UC San Diego. It was intimidating, but she reached out to the veterans center before even arriving on campus. Soon, she became a regular.
Wanting to give back, Dinh became a leader in supporting other nontraditional students as a transfer peer coach, often sought out by other military-connected students. With help from her mentors at the Triton Transfer Hub and Career Center, she went on to obtain her master’s in higher education administration at Penn and landed her current job as the Undergraduate Student Veteran Program Director at Cornell University.
“What was really integral to my success at UC and beyond was just knowing there are so many people like me who are unfamiliar with the higher education system, and connecting with them and other student veterans,” Dinh says. “It was empowering to know that, ‘Hey, we’ve done a lot of challenging things in the military, but now we can forge our own path, whether that’s similar to what we did in the military or completely different.’”
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Amanda Lassiter, Coast Guard veteran and reservist, UC Irvine
Fourth-year transfer student in Informatics
Staff member, UC Irvine Veteran Services Center
First-generation college student
“I grew up in a very small town in rural Virginia. A lot of farm land, a lot of trees, but an environment where I knew that an education wasn’t going to be afforded to me unless I worked for it myself,” says Amanda Lassiter, a senior at UC Irvine. Drawn to humanitarian work in search and rescue and the promise of an education paid for by the GI Bill, Lassiter was 15 when she first told her parents she wanted to join the Coast Guard.
Fast forward nearly two decades and Lassiter, 34, has 15 years of military service under her belt. She spent her early years of active duty as a small boat mechanic on the Chesapeake Bay before enrolling in IT training. The program brought her to Coast Guard stations in Petaluma and Point Reyes, where she fell in love with the West Coast.
Like many service members, Lassiter accumulated college credits wherever she was stationed. These eventually led her to transfer to UC Irvine as an Informatics major, planning to use her degree as a springboard into tech. Although she traded a full-time military post for student life, she still serves in the Coast Guard Reserve, reporting for duty in San Diego once a month. It’s work she loves, though balancing it with academics can be tough.
“I was five weeks into my first quarter at UC when I was recalled to active duty to work for FEMA hurricane response,” she explains. “Initially, I was frustrated because I had already gotten halfway through the quarter and I was so excited to step forward into being a full-time student. But the mission made it worth it.” Lassiter was gone for two months and had to scrap the fall quarter, retaking the same classes in winter. But her resilience and Coast Guard discipline kept her on track.
Lassiter now works at the UC Irvine Veteran Services Center. “It can be a really hard transition to leave the military ecosystem where you’re told what to do, where to be and when to be there. Now we’re all kind of out on our own, just finding our way as students,” she says. “Finding each other and being able to lean on each other and talk about our experiences, reflect on where we’ve been — that’s so important. We’re not wearing the uniform anymore, but we’re not alone. We’re all doing this together.”
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Sebastian Smith, U.S. Air Force veteran, UC Davis
Third-year transfer student in Plant Biology
First-generation college student
Sebastian Smith is making less of a career pivot than a total revamp. At age 48, he is getting his B.S., with the goal of earning a doctorate and becoming a scientific researcher. Just three years ago, he was retiring after a 20-year career in the Air Force.
Stationed in England with his wife and three kids as he neared retirement, Smith was given the choice of where to finish his service. He’d taken many college classes over the years, but wanted a new path. “I have always been interested in science and loved discovery,” he says. “When I was trying to narrow down my interests, scientific research just clicked for me.”
Landing on Plant Biology, Smith looked into programs and found that UC Davis topped the list. Academic destination in focus, he relocated to Travis Air Force Base, just 30 minutes from campus. After retiring, he enrolled at Solano Community College to complete the coursework needed to transfer.
This isn’t Smith’s first foray into a four-year college. Straight out of high school, he enrolled at Syracuse University. But no one in his family had graduated from college, and not knowing how to do it, he ended up taking on a huge course load while juggling two jobs. After he dropped out, he spent several years managing a Blockbuster video store, where he met his wife. When she got interested in the military, he went to see the recruiters with her, intending to talk her out of it. Instead, he ended up being the one to enlist and became an Air Force cybersecurity specialist. He excelled in the role, but it wasn’t his calling.
“The military forced me to confront my weaknesses and learn to do things that were uncomfortable, like public speaking,” he says. “I had so many spectacular experiences throughout my career, and I met so many amazing people. But I didn’t necessarily enjoy my professional field.”
Now, Smith is soaking up the UC Davis experience. Older than most classmates, he’s become a mentor figure. “They appreciate that I’m a veteran. Sometimes, when they might not be comfortable approaching a professor to ask a question, they’ll come and ask me instead. I’ve had more than one professor tell me that it is like having a second teacher in the classroom.”
One highlight is sharing the experience with his kids: his youngest lives with him in student housing while finishing high school online, and his two oldest are following in his footsteps at Solano Community College. “I transferred to UC Davis using the TAG program, and now my oldest son wants to do the same. My kids are just a few semesters behind me, so it’s awesome to share my experience and help them in the process.”
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Nathaniel Wentland, U.S. Navy Reserve, UC Davis
Second-year MBA student
Peer advisor, UC Davis Veteran Success Center
Nathaniel Wentland’s resume reads a little differently than most of his classmates at UC Davis. For starters, he drove a $442 million ship through the Strait of Hormuz in the middle of the night while the rest of the crew slept, lived out of a cargo container in Djibouti during the pandemic and spent a year documenting military casualties in Afghanistan. His latest challenge? Earning an MBA.
Nathaniel Wentland at Forward Operating Base Lightning in Afghanistan during a site visit. Courtesy photo
The son of a 20-year Army veteran, Wentland chose the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy for college at age 17. By his sophomore year, he was spending 4 months at a time at sea, stretching to 8 months in his junior year. The program was so physically and psychologically demanding that a third of his cohort dropped out. But Wentland made it through, earning a bachelor’s degree and an officer’s commission in the Navy Reserve. Between a career as a merchant marine and over a thousand active duty Reserve days, he spent the next 10 years crisscrossing the globe.
When he got married and had a daughter, Wentland knew it was time to shift to a shoreside career. Accessing GI Bill benefits, Wentland was able to pursue his longtime goal of an advanced degree.
Shifting to the landlocked life of an Aggie, Wentland quickly found the campus Veteran Success Center — a place to hang out, study, get assistance with VA benefits, and get connected with all kinds of campus resources. Wentland became so familiar with the center that he ended up getting a job there as a peer advisor. He now plans events for military-connected students like himself, including programs on financial planning, budgeting, and how to strategically use GI Bill benefits. Meanwhile, he’s still active in the reserve, though his extended deployments have morphed into monthly drill weekends. The reinvention comes with plenty of challenges, but he’s committed to landing on the other side of that degree.
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