Terry Traylor, a Marine Corps veteran and NDSU doctoral student studying software and security engineering, was recently selected for the 2024/2025 Veterans of Foreign Wars - Student Veterans of America Legislative Fellowship.
Terry Traylor, a Marine Corps veteran and NDSU doctoral student studying software and security engineering, was recently selected for the 2024/2025 Veterans of Foreign Wars - Student Veterans of America Legislative Fellowship.
Held annually since 2014, the VFW-SVA Legislative Fellowship provides student veteran fellows invaluable experience advocating in their communities and on Capitol Hill for solutions to pressing veterans’ issues. The fellowship is a roughly semester-long immersive experience for fellows to receive advocacy training and mentorship from each organizations’ professional staff, create community outreach plans and actively engage community and national leaders on a shared VFW and SVA policy priority.
"Being selected to participate in the VFW-SVA 2024 Legislative Fellowship is a tremendous opportunity to continue to serve in a program that helps others,” Traylor said. “While in the fellowship I will learn how to advocate at the national level for resources that benefit the state of North Dakota and NDSU students. Our specific project this year is the National Guard and Reserve GI Bill Parity Act — an initiative that will directly impact NDSU student veterans.”
As part the program, fellows will attend SVA’s NATCON 2025 in January before heading to Washington, D.C., in March to participate in the VFW’s annual Washington Conference. During the VFW’s conference, fellows will accompany VFW advocates from their respective states to discuss the shared policy priority with lawmakers on Capitol Hill resulting in tangible advocacy experience at the highest levels.
“Participating in this program will provide me with an opportunity to apply some of my software and security engineering/cyber project management skills to a real-world advocacy and policy development effort with immediate impacts,” Traylor said. “As engineers, we sometimes forget that the problem-solving skills we learn in graduate school can also be applied to socio-technical domain problems. The VFW-SVA Fellowship will help me explore that space, find ways to apply advocacy to my future career hopefully as a university professor and share the lessons learned with my engineering graduate school peers.”
To qualify for the fellowship, student veterans must be a VFW member, be currently enrolled in an accredited college or university program, write an essay conveying the importance of veteran advocacy, submit a video detailing why they are a good fit for the program and complete an interview.
Traylor said NDSU’s Center for Writers helped him immensely when applying for the fellowship.
“I think being selected for this fellowship will provide the NDSU campus with an opportunity to showcase why the Bison Nation remains legendary,” he said. “For example, I worked closely with two Writing Center student consultants -- Sam and Brooke -- to prepare my advocacy application package. Their outstanding work and mentorship resulted in my selection. During my fellowship, I will continue to work with the Writing Center team and highlight through clean policy writing how awesome our campus and state are."
Traylor is the only student veteran from a Midwest university to have received the fellowship for the 2024/2025 academic year.
