Military Leadership Alumni: Victoria Schmidt, ’21
Written by Victoria Schmidt, ’21
I was born and raised in Denver, Colorado, and graduated from Hillsdale in 2021 with a B.S. in biology. While at Hillsdale, I held leadership roles in Student Federation and the Hillsdale College Emergency Response Team, volunteered at the Hillsdale Hospital Emergency Department, and established and led a new GOAL program, the Military Mentorship Volunteer Program. I was a member of Beta Beta Beta biology honor society, Sigma Zeta national science and mathematics honor society, and the Lamplighters women’s honorary.
After graduation, I took a gap year and worked as an emergency department medical scribe while applying for medical school. I applied to just one school, the F. Edward Hébert School of Medicine at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USUHS), the nation’s military medical school. Students serve as active-duty officers and receive additional military-specific medical instruction and military skills training while attending school for free, in exchange for years of service after residency. I accepted a direct commission from the Army and attended the Direct Commission Course before starting school in August of 2022.
The Military Leadership minor was not officially offered when I attended Hillsdale, but I had the opportunity to take several of the courses with Dr. Peter Jennings. In retrospect, these were the most important classes I took at Hillsdale. Prior to these classes, I was quite naive, and the basis of the military’s appeal was my desire for adrenaline and adventure. I had never considered how God’s will could be involved in military service; never pondered the questions of duty, justice, or honor inherent to military officership; never wrestled with the inevitable brutality and horrors of war; and never contemplated what it meant to swear an oath of “unlimited liability.”
Through countless hours of class discussions, reflective writing, mentorship, and personal soul-searching, I radically altered, then matured, my understanding of military officership, which enabled me to take my oath of office in July of 2022 with no mental reservation, absolutely confident in my decision. As my peers and I receive more instruction, as we are exposed to the horrors of war, we are also expected to operate as physicians within this world. I have seen some of my peers struggle greatly with their decision, as they did not have the opportunity to ponder this reality of war before commissioning. While my time at Hillsdale was short, these classes enabled me to pursue self-studies that have helped deepen my moral understanding of my dual profession, having sworn two equally-binding oaths, and to provide mentorship to my peers who are realizing the need to wrestle with these ideas before it is too late.