When Shannon Travis was stationed at Balad Air Base in Iraq for 14 months, one of her jobs was refueling helicopters. The shifts were long, and when there were no helicopters, she and her team had hours of downtime. They whittled away the time playing cards, watching TV and just hanging out.
With all that unstructured time, Travis started taking online courses toward the college degree she hoped to one day earn, knocking out prerequisites such as English and biology. “I was the only one [in my unit] taking classes,” she laughs. “They all made fun of me for it.”
Travis’ stint in Iraq ended in 2008, and after a few major life changes, she is now a staff sergeant in the Army Reserve and a senior at McDaniel College, a private four-year college in rural Maryland. Her husband, Patrick Robbins, who is also a veteran and whom she met while stationed in Germany, graduated from McDaniel in 2015.
When Travis and Robbins returned to the United States in 2010, they joined the Army Reserve and started taking classes at Carroll Community College in Maryland. Travis dreamed of becoming a Foreign Service officer, so she set her sights on transferring to American, George Washington or Georgetown universities, with their renowned international relations programs.
She was also curious about McDaniel, which was just up the road in Westminster. “I heard a lot of good things from the community college about McDaniel, so I went to the political science department and I talked to the academic dean,” Travis says. Soon, she was sold on the school’s welcoming environment and is now caught up in what she calls the “political science bubble” on campus.
Her studies were interrupted in 2014 when she was called overseas to serve as a force protector in Afghanistan, an experience that offered very different opportunities from her time in Balad. She acted as a liaison with local communities, even learning to speak some Dari, the local language. “It’s taking me longer to get my degree, but I think Afghanistan also brought a lot of experience,” she says.
The college experience that Travis and Robbins received was made possible with the Post-9/11 GI Bill, which offers service members and their families some of the most comprehensive and generous benefits yet since the original iteration of the GI Bill. Under the Yellow Ribbon Program of the Post-9/11 GI Bill, military members can receive up to $21,084.89 of their tuition and fees at a private college or international school covered annually. Travis says that she would encourage all veterans or service members eligible for the GI Bill to make use of it, saying, “If they don’t use it, they’re missing out on so, so much.”
