Julia Hajjar is a senior with Syracuse University’s College of Arts & Sciences. In addition to being the daughter to a U.S. Army officer, she’s also a cadet in the U.S. Army Reserve Officer Training Corps. In this video, Julia reflects on her time at Syracuse University and highlights her experiences as a military-connected student.
Transcript
I have currently lived in New York for the past 10 years. I lived at West Point so it’s about like three and a half hours away not too far. We’re constantly moving like it was every 3 years especially when my dad was earlier in the Army I was younger so we just constantly moving and but when I visited Syracuse I instantly got that feeling of being at home, going to a football game, seeing all the fans, the raw emotion that everyone has for the games.
The beautiful buildings on campus I never wanted to stop looking at them. I wanted to walk around when I was visiting the whole time. Everything about Syracuse really made me feel safe and it made me feel like I could thrive here and become the person that I always wanted to be.
I feel like what sticks out to me is the resources and great experiences we get, just the constant support that just being a military child I get from the OVMA and being an ROTC Cadet. Now we have a whole workout area that we can utilize during PT and out of PT. And I love both of the relationships that I’ve made like my friends who are not in the program and my friends who are, but just the relationships that I have built with the cadet program. It’s not compared to any other relationship, both of my roommates are in the program with me, I have met some of my best friends that I’ll probably see in my future Army Career and I feel like the experiences that we go through together – even though it’s ROTC and we’re not in the Army yet – I feel like going to like our field training exercises waking up for PT every morning going on those hard rucks and runs and really just playing to each other. But loving sticking together and making us grow closer in that way.