Helping veterans succeed

It’s difficult enough leaving one career to pursue another.

Tack on transitioning from military to civilian life and the confusion of deciphering Veterans Affairs education benefits, and the already challenging task begins to become daunting.

A 10-year United States Navy veteran who has navigated her way through higher education and already experienced the pitfalls firsthand, Amber Mathwig gets it.

“They’ve already finished one career and they’re ready to move onto their next one,” she said. “This isn’t a do-over, this is a second career — a second life — for people after military service.”

As the new Student Veterans Assistance Coordinator in the Office of the Dean of Students, Mathwig is dedicated to helping the growing student-veteran population succeed at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and get their second lives off to a strong start.

“I’ve enjoyed being in school so much and I’ve made a lot of mistakes in using my benefits to the maximum — not understanding how the GI Bill works, not always looking at transfer credits,” she said. “It became an interest to me to help people be successful in school.”

With Carolina’s student-veteran population growing to its largest size since World War II, the Student Veterans Assistance Coordinator position was created to help ensure that military-affiliated Tar Heels — including veterans, active duty personnel, reservists, National Guard, spouses and dependents — have the resources that they need to succeed.

“If we want to see these students maximize their potential for success and ultimately graduate, we need to put in place specialized support and programming to ease the transition from the military life to the university classroom,” said Desirée Rieckenberg, senior associate dean of students and director of the Office of the Dean of Students. “The primary role of Student Veterans Assistance Coordinator position is to do just that — provide programming and services to ease the transition to Carolina.”

Hired earlier in the fall, Mathwig has become the primary point of contact for Carolina’s military-affiliated students to assist them through University life — a challenge Mathwig understands well, having already forged her own path from service member to student.

Mathwig wasn’t immediately drawn to the idea of serving in the military. It wasn’t until after 9/11 that she returned a recruiter’s call and enlisted in the Navy as a master at arms to provide law enforcement for the branch.

“It wasn’t completely out of the scope of what I had envisioned myself doing because I had thought about going to the police academy at one point,” the Arlington, Minnesota native said.

She thrived in the military environment — first in Sasebo, Japan where she provided local policing and then in San Diego where she became a training instructor.

Mathwig then spent six months in Baghdad, Iraq serving with the legal Task Force 314 before being transferred to Norfolk, Virginia where she was assigned to the USS Kearsarge.

“When [masters at arms] go onto a ship, they’re just a very small, small portion of the ship, but they are responsible for a variety of tasks from assisting the commanding officer with heads and beds to filing a case on an assault that happened to training the ship’s personnel,” she said.

After several months of being dry-docked and then training exercises, the USS Kearsarge left for a nine-month deployment to patrol the Mediterranean and Middle East in 2010.

Not long after returning to the United States after the deployment, Mathwig began to prepare for life after the military and enrolled in Virginia Wesleyan College to study sociology.

“It’s what I had long been interested in,” she said. “I had started out doing business because I thought it would be useful, but I had no brain for that. I couldn’t do that work. So I decided to switch to something that interested me and what interested me is people.”

Mathwig’s enlistment ended February 2012 at the rank of petty officer first class master at arms, and after graduating from Virginia Wesleyan College in May 2013 she enrolled at in UNC-Greensboro’s Women’s and Gender Studies program. While at UNC-Greensboro, Mathwig began using her own experiences to help other service members succeed in college.

“Amber played an integral role in the more recent establishment of a Veteran Resource Center at the UNC-Greensboro,” Rieckenberg said. “During that time, Amber applied her academic knowledge and research on veterans with her practical experience to effectively advocate for and implement programs and services for student veterans. As UNC-CH moves forward, her tangible experience will allow us to not only meet, but exceed the standard for campus-based veteran and military-affiliated student support.”

When UNC-Chapel Hill began searching for a Student Veterans Assistance Coordinator, Mathwig jumped at the opportunity to set up another successful program for service members.

“I already have this background,” she said. “I’ve already seen success and failure in different endeavors. I’ve already seen what students are asking for.”

Mathwig now hopes to change the atmosphere at Carolina and make veterans a success model — not a deficit model in need or assistance.

“Once we can shift the atmosphere a little bit,” she said, “we can shift how people respond to the needs of veteran students.”