Veterans attending classes at Robert Morris University recently got an extra token of appreciation for their military service: A free iPad, complete with an app designed just for student veterans at the college outside of Pittsburgh.
“Robert Morris is trying to be a pioneer in serving veterans,” college spokesman Mark Houser says. “We think that one of the best ways to facilitate that is to have a platform where they can keep in touch with each other and their advisers.”
The app’s features include a directory of phone numbers useful to student veterans, links to campus news items, a calendar of events on campus and a veterans’ blog. Houser says the school hopes to add online course registration to the app.
More than 150 veterans attend Robert Morris, most of them through the Post-9/11 GI Bill that provides tuition assistance to those who have served in the military after Sept. 11, 2001. They received the iPads during a campus Veterans Day breakfast and are getting used to how they work.
“They’re sort of learning,” Houser says. “They’re intrigued.”
Eventually the college hopes to give iPads to all its students. But veterans were first, given Robert Morris’ commitment to assisting them, Houser says. Keystone Edge wrote about the Robert Morris entrepreneurship program for veterans earlier this year. Also, the college is one of numerous schools nationwide that waive tuition for veterans who come in under the latest GI Bill, and it used a state grant to form a veteran assistance office on campus. That grant also paid for the iPads.
Source: Mark Houser, Robert Morris University
Writer: Rebecca VanderMeulen
