Jared Lyon, Florida State ’11, is a non-traditional student in more than one sense. Beyond serving in the United States Navy and graduating at age 29, the story of all he accomplished as a student is both unusual and amazing.
For his impact on Florida State’s campus, this past SigEp chapter president was named Student Veteran of the Year at the 2011 Student Veterans of America National Conference. The award recognizes his work with the FSU Collegiate Veterans Association, particularly leading a project to build a 35,000-square-foot Student Veterans Center that will cost $25 million. The building, and the programming within it, should make Florida State the most veteran-friendly campus in the country.
“You never want to go into a place and not leave it better than you found it,” Lyon said. “I was looking for a way to make Florida State better for what I viewed to be my population of students.”
Serving in the Navy Lyon began serving in August 2001, just one month before the September 11th attacks. “I joined a peacetime military and the world changed while I was in basic training,” he said. He spent four years deployed on submarines worldwide as a Navy diver. Lyon came of age not in college classrooms or libraries, but while recovering items lost overboard at sea and doing security searches on nuclear vessels.
After completing his service, he moved to Florida, where he worked and earned an associate’s degree. He enrolled at Florida State in August 2010 to pursue a bachelor’s degree and set a goal to graduate before he turned 30—even though it took him 21 credits in his final semester to do it.
“Jared’s an all-in kind of guy,” explained Associate Dean of Students Adam Goldstein. “He doesn’t do anything halfway.”
Building the Student Veterans Center Lyon’s inspiration to build the center came during the 2010 Student Veterans of America National Conference, an event he describes as, “Kind of like a CLA for student veterans.” He heard a statistic that student veterans are less likely to graduate than their nonveteran counterparts. This struck a chord with Lyon.
“We’re older, with more life experience, and more maturity and leadership characteristics,” he reasoned. “It was my impression veterans would be better suited to graduate.”
Letting this trend continue seemed counterintuitive to his training to leave no man behind. Said Lyon, “I came back to campus energized, much like you would coming home from CLA or Ruck.”
Soon after, he pitched his ideas directly to the president of the university, who spent two hours listening to Lyon identify the various problems facing student veterans. A committee of 18 began planning the Student Veterans Center, which will offer space for socializing and studying, and services like counseling, physical therapy and tutoring. The building will serve as a meeting house for past, present and future military members, and a museum chronicling Florida States’ rich military history. The university currently has about 400 student veterans, but the center will be open to many more—from faculty and staff to military dependents.
“It will encompass that idea of community,” Lyon said. “not just providing services but changing a campus culture. No other veterans center focuses on community like that.”
Joining SigEp Lyon’s arrival at Florida State coincided with SigEp’s effort to re-colonize a chapter there. “As a non-traditional student, Greek life was not on my radar at all,” he said. But after applying for the Balanced Man Scholarship, that quickly changed.
After meeting some other guys who’d be forming the new chapter, several of whom were veterans themselves, his decision to join was easy.
One thing he hadn’t anticipated when he arrived at Florida State was connecting with very many of the 18-22-year-old students. The same guy who dove underneath nuclear submarines claims he was intimidated to get to know the younger students. That changed once he joined the Fraternity.
“SigEp was my first experience interacting with that population on campus,” he said. “It was a cool experience for me to feel so welcome. We’re all college students going through a similar shared experience.”
Early in the spring semester, Lyon was named chapter president.
Getting support from the Greek community As Lyon’s committee began fundraising for the student veterans center, he used his connections within the Greek community to help. Through Florida State’s prestigious film school, he set up an early screening of the Sundance award winning war documentary “Hell and Back Again”.
The event included an engaging question-and-answer session with the director, producer, the subject of the film and his wife. Publicity from the IFC helped raise $30,000 in one day.
“It all came full circle,” Lyon said. “Those connections wouldn’t have happened without SigEp.” While the Navy has been such a critical part of Lyon’s life, and the student veterans project a central focus of his time at Florida State, it’s undeniable that SigEp also has played a substantial role.
It’s no surprise to him that he was one of eight veterans in the chapter’s early days on campus.
“We were searching for something that we were missing,” he said. “When you come back to a college campus [from the military] you’re no longer part of a team. But that’s something that SigEp offers.”
Building the Student Veterans Center 
