Veterans and Service Members Are a Key Part of the Mix in the Structures Lab
Benjamin Janssen, Libby McCarriston, and Caleb Pym are among the active-duty military members and veterans currently working in Lauren Stewart's civil engineering lab, where researchers use blast simulation and ballistics testing to study how structures respond to explosive forces and projectiles. Master's students Janssen and Pym, left to right in foreground, are officers in the U.S. Air Force. McCarriston is earning her master's after serving five years in the Army.
Failure is a way of life in a research lab. Ideas that don’t work lead to ones that do. And every failure has important lessons for future projects.
It’s different than the military, where failure often isn’t an option. Georgia Tech civil engineer Lauren Stewart learned about that difference early in her career.
She recalls an experiment with her first two graduate students, who were Army officers. After months of preparation, nothing in the tests worked the way they had expected. It was a setback, and one student took it hard.
“I wasn’t a big deal to me at all. I said, ‘Don’t worry about it. It’s fine.’ And he said, ‘In my world, if I fail, people die,’” Stewart said.
“It’s stuck with me ever since. I have taken it to heart with every other student because it made me understand how different his experience was. And that’s part of how I advise and mentor students now: to warn them about what can happen and show it’s not failure.”
Active-duty military members and veterans have become a hallmark of Stewart’s lab in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE). Her team has one of the highest concentrations of veterans and military members at Georgia Tech. Since those first two Ph.D. students, about half of her graduate students at any given time have served in the armed forces or are currently commissioned.