"Board seeks to ease veterans’ transition to the classroom" by Dan Adams | Globe Correspondent, May 12, 2013
When Marine Corps heavy machine gunner Erik DeGiorgi returned to his native Plymouth in 2005, the South Shore town seemed nearly as foreign as the endless valleys his unit cleared in Afghanistan.
“I had changed. I didn’t know how to even communicate with my friends and family here,” he said. “Our unit in Afghanistan, we were the first ones there. Our job was to push north and gain territory, and it was just day-to-day. Coming back was an extreme change and I didn’t know how to deal with it . . . I was hugely adrift.”
But on Saturday, DeGiorgi stood at a podium in front of fellow veterans and high-level political leaders as an Ivy League student, a successful entrepreneur, and the point person of a new state initiative to help Massachusetts’s roughly 8,500 student veterans....
Today, DeGiorgi runs an international computer hardware business with his father. Their machines help power the landmark WGBH billboard over the Massachusetts Turnpike. He is also studying at Harvard Business School, and has taken classes at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His intellectual appetite ranges from the finer points of American history (his favorite author is Howard Zinn) to mind-bending algorithms that dictate how objects fold in three-dimensional space....
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Related: Zinn is History
The Day After Howard's End
