PROFILES

Soldier to student

Chris Munro helps veterans succeed

BY BRUCE PIERCEY, JOURNALISM ’82

RANK AND FILE soldiers are trained to be team players: uncomplaining, self-reliant and discouraged from showing emotion. That’s good for combat, but not so good when a soldier’s military career is over, and they enter what to many is a foreign world: civilian life.

Chris Munro, co-ordinator of Ryerson’s new Veterans Transition to Education (VTE) program, knows firsthand what that’s like. For the past two years he has been working at the VTE to create a support system for veterans who are seeking higher education.

“A lot of soldiers who leave the military run into release trauma, a military specific form of reverse culture shock. They come from a world where they have a place and see themselves as part of a much larger entity, and then find themselves in a civilian world that is focused on the self and personal rights, and a working world where there is a tension between loyalty to the employer and loyalty to oneself.”

When Munro left the Canadian Forces in his 20s, after signing on at just 17, the transition was catastrophic and led to depression, marital breakdown and addiction.

He says veterans who leave the Forces for an uncertain future all too often isolate and engage in self-destructive behaviour.

Munro believes that proper support for soldiers who are preparing to leave the services, as well as after release, could alleviate much of the distress he has seen—and experienced.

Many enlisted soldiers enter the Forces without a high school education, and then leave the military—many after only a few years—without marketable skills. If they don’t have a physical or diagnosed mental disability, they are not eligible for most Veterans Affairs Canada programs. Many do not believe post-secondary education is for them, in part because they underestimate the value of their own life experience and their ability to handle university-level studies, Munro says.

He knows the challenges facing older students. He entered Ryerson’s transition program to university through The Chang School’s Spanning the Gaps, but was skeptical that he could keep up. “As a blue-collar soldier with a Grade 9 education, I didn’t think I could handle university. When I got there, I was surrounded by bright young people, but I came to see that they did not have the depth of knowledge that my life experiences had given me.”

Munro took one course, then another, earning his undergraduate degree in social work before completing his master’s last year. His role in launching VTE came about when Ryerson President Mohamed Lachemi heard him interviewed on CBC Radio about the challenges facing veterans. Impressed, President Lachemi set up a meeting with Munro, and before long the VTE program was in motion.

He is looking toward September 2019, when he expects to have a small cohort of veterans enrolled in Ryerson. He also wants to use the research from his major research paper as the basis for advocating for more support for veterans.

“I want to be an advocate because soldiers are not conditioned to advocate for themselves. They are trained to be self-reliant.”

Munro believes that his route to success through education will work for many other veterans. “I took a big risk to come to Ryerson, but it was the best thing I ever did.”

Winter 2019 / Ryerson University Magazine 35