“I was born in southern Oregon, in a high-desert town just north of the California border called Klamath Falls. My maternal grandpa was the father figure in my life growing up, and he was an Air Force veteran. His duty station at the time of his retirement was Kingsley Field, a small base in that town where he would plant his post-military roots. Military service was always ingrained in me as a sort of rite of passage. Generations before me on maternal and paternal sides had served their country.

I was in eighth grade when I watched the towers fall on Sept. 11. My whole high school career in Klamath Falls I saw men leave for service in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some didn’t come back. College was never an option for me at that time; I grew up really, really poor. Even the local community college was a financial impossibility. The day after I graduated, I moved to southern Arizona to work as a pipe-layer for a sewer- and water-line construction company.

After my job as a pipe-layer and a stint as an old-West reenactor in Tombstone, I moved back to Oregon in the summer of 2007 to work as a dock hand at Crater Lake National Park. It was from here that I decided to join the military. I called the local Marine recruiter during “the surge,” when all military branches were ballooning in size to support the two wars.

I liked that the Marines didn’t promise me anything. You could have gotten tens of thousands of dollars in signing bonuses to join the Air Force, Army or Navy. When I joined the Marines they gave me a free one-way ticket to Marine Corps Recruit Depot, San Diego. I was stationed in Barstow, Calif. for my entire 5-year enlistment. In the summer of 2010, I was offered an Individual Augment billet through Marine Forces Central, to deploy to Al Udeid Air Base in Doha, Qatar. That was very important to me. I would have felt my service was missing a critical component if I didn’t deploy overseas at a time of war.

I cherish my time in the Marines. One of my best life decisions was to join the Corps. But one of my best life decisions was also to exit the Corps. I wanted to use the Post-9/11 GI Bill to do something that seemed impossible just a few years before: go to college. During the final year of my enlistment, I started reading books about science. I started with Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, and eventually made my way, painstakingly, through Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species. I was fascinated with the origin and evolution of life on Earth. In 2012, I enrolled at Arizona State University as an astrobiology major.

The Marines taught me to be comfortable with the uncomfortable. Don’t be adverse to adversity. Nothing is handed to you in this life. The only thing you should ever ask for is an opportunity. If you want something, go get it.”

—Chad Ostrander, an assistant professor of geology and geophysics, U.S. Marine Corps veteran

Ostrander served in the U.S. Marine Corps from 2007 to 2012. He reached the rank of sergeant and was deployed to Qatar in 2010. He and his wife live in Salt Lake City with their son and daughter, ages 5 and 8. His research at the U examines stable isotopes to shed light on how Earth’s atmosphere and oceans were oxygenated 2.2 billion years ago.