Heather Lawrence

“Originally, I was just going to get my bachelor’s degree and go about my business, but now I’m in a PhD program.”

Heather Lawrence, Navy Veteran and University of Central Florida (UCF) alumna, was a recipient of a scholarship from SVA and Raytheon in 2016. She used the scholarship to sustain herself financially during the summer in between GI Bill funding.

Student Veterans of America has partnered with Raytheon Technologies since 2013 to provide scholarships to student veterans attending school full-time. These $10,000 scholarships have been pivotal in the lives of many student veterans, including Lawrence.

After separating from the military, Lawrence decided to attend community college in order to improve her career opportunities. She chose to attend community college to get herself back into the groove of academic rigor. “I went to a community college because I couldn’t remember math to save my life, it had been way too long,” said Lawrence.

After graduating with an AA in engineering, Lawrence then attended UCF in pursuit of a bachelors’ degree in computer engineering. While at UCF, Lawrence searched for a community consisting of similar-minded people with whom she could associate. “While trying to find my community I still haven’t really met with other veterans, I had fallen in with cybersecurity,” said Lawrence. It was in this realm of cybersecurity that she created a group called the Collegiate Cyber Defense Club, also known as Hack at UCF.

Lawrence first learned about the Raytheon-SVA scholarship through UCF’s College of Engineering. They frequently emailed a list of scholarships that would apply to students in one of their many tech programs. The funds awarded from the scholarship helped Lawrence immensely. “The scholarship helped reduce my debt and helped me cover the gaps where the GI Bill did not,” said Lawrence.

During the summer months when Lawrence had no courses, the GI Bill education benefit did not pay for any expenses; in the years prior to being awarded the scholarship, she had used personal loans. “Normally, to fund that, I’d have to take out another loan,” said Lawrence.

Lawrence credits her cybersecurity skills and taking the extra effort to do community events as one of the reasons she had been sufficiently competitive to be selected as a recipient of the Raytheon-SVA scholarship.

Ironically, Lawrence also mentioned that one of her driving factors to being highly competitive in her computer engineering program was gender bias. She recalled a moment during her first semester as a student at UCF where a lab assistant questioned her knowledge of the basics as if she didn’t belong.  “They told me I couldn’t do it! That’s basically it, I’m going out of spite at this point,” said Lawrence. “Originally, I was just going to get my bachelor’s degree and go about my business, but now I’m in a PhD program.”

Lawrence hopes that her journey can help others, and she uses her platform to do just that. Through her creation of the Collegiate Cyber Defense Club, she has opened up opportunities to many fellow students at UCF. Her advice for fellow student veterans is to do your best at whatever task is at hand, be active within a campus community, and most importantly show up – whether that’s making a meeting, a class, or a campus event. Lawrence said, “It surprised me over and over and over again just how effective being there was at increasing the odds of success.”

Written by Kameron Smith