More than 16,000 students are returning to school and approximately 600 of them are veterans.

“The number of student veterans are going to continue to grow because of soldiers returning from the war,” said Jimmy Smith, senior international relations and history major and president of Chico State’s Student Veteran Organization.

Smith served in the Marine Corps as a cryptologic linguist specializing in Arabic. He was deployed to Iraq in 2004 as a civil consultant. He gathered information about threats in dangerous areas for a military network that relayed the messages to troops.

Smith spent over a year in an intensive Arabic language course in Monterey before being deployed to Iraq. Each weekday, he was required to study Arabic for seven hours and fit in military duty. He learned not to fall behind in classes.

“You have a list of 80 words and then two days later, you have a new list of 80 different words you have to assimilate in your brain,” Smith said.

The military is good at getting people to be goal-orientated and teaching them how to accomplish those goals quickly, he said.

Trevor Borelli, sophomore mechanical engineering major, received a Navy achievement medal for inspecting 1200 diesel trucks and successfully repairing many of them when he served for the Marine Corps as a diesel mechanic.

He spent 16 weeks learning mechanics from a computer before being deployed to Iraq and it was nothing like learning from hands-on assignments, he said.

“A lot of on-the-job training, you figure it out, ” Borelli said. “There’s lots of technical manuals and computers you can hook up to some trucks, which not a lot of people know how to do. For my job, you had to learn to do it yourself — you can’t learn from a book.”

Borelli said his group mates often give him the task of sketching designs in his engineering class because he’s fast.

“Student veterans work well as a group member — mostly as a leader, but they can pick up any role and succeed,” said Larry Langwell, coordinator at Veterans Affairs and business administration graduate student.

Langwell served as a staff sergeant in the Air Force. He has been working with student veterans for more than 20 years. Langwell administers veterans education benefits to students who are eligible.

Student veterans bring a global understanding to the classroom, he said. They all have a multitude of skills that even experienced faculty and staff on campus have not been exposed to.

“Veterans use their experience to their advantage and in a crisis, they’re usually running towards the problem instead of away from it,” Langwell said.

Christine Lee can be reached at [email protected] or @leechris017 on Twitter.