Liam McDonald finished basic training a week before his first day of college.
He left for Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, two days after his high school graduation, fitting basic training into the summer before his first semester at Michigan State. McDonald, who graduated from James Madison College this spring, had planned the timing down to the day.
Over the next four years, he would learn to balance the demands of military service with the expectations of a rigorous academic program, shaping a path toward a career in national security.
The route to MSU started in his senior year of high school, later than it does for many students. By his own account, he was not the most driven student at the time and hadn’t given college much consideration. “I thought I was going to go, but it’s not something I planned,” he explained. “I didn’t take the steps to do it until senior year.”
He applied to two schools, but MSU was his top choice. When a representative from MSU came to his high school in metro Detroit to interview students, McDonald was accepted on the spot.
Then came the harder question: “Okay, I’m in, and this is really cool, and I might be making a great change for my life. How can I afford this?” he recalled.
A few days later, a National Guard recruiter visited his high school. Upon hearing how he could possibly afford University, McDonald skipped class one day that March to enlist, signing a six-year contract.
McDonald had wanted a role in the military intelligence branch, but the training timeline would have extended into his first semester at MSU. So he asked for one of the shortest training timelines available and became a combat engineer, a role he describes as enabling infantry operations by clearing obstacles and, often, using explosives. Basic training fit into the narrow window between high school graduation and the start of college. His advanced individual training, or AIT, would come later, creating one of the most difficult academic stretches of his time at MSU.
James Madison College entered the picture almost as quickly. He had applied to MSU as a political science student, and the coordinator who visited his school introduced him to JMC. McDonald and his father did some research and decided that the small residential college was a good fit.
He arrived at JMC drawn to the Political Theory and Constitutional Democracy major, with early ambitions to run for office. As the political landscape shifted, so did his focus. He set his sights on national security and added International Relations, a major that drew directly on his experience in the Guard.
That overlap between service and study became an asset in the classroom. McDonald could connect coursework on diplomacy and alliances to annual training, where he regularly crossed paths with soldiers from Latvia and Sierra Leone, both partners in Michigan’s State Partnership Program. For his field experience credit, he took on a research project writing policy memos grounded in his own military experience, work he counts among the most influential of his time at JMC.
Sustaining all of it required a discipline he sums up in three words: “embrace the suck.” His Guard schedule included a drill each month, often stretching from Thursday to Sunday costing him class time, and several weeks each summer. Coursework happened wherever it could.
“Whenever we would have downtime and were just sitting around, that’s when I’d bust out and start working on some homework,” he said. “Later at night, while everyone’s in the barracks, I’d be reading books. There were drill weekends where I had finals the next week, so I’d be writing essays.”
The hardest stretch came in the fall of his sophomore year. His advanced individual training ran late, and he returned to campus midway through October. He walked into one class, and the professor told him his midterm was two days later. McDonald dropped that course, picked up an independent study and spent the rest of the semester catching up.
Quitting, he said, never came up — not while rappelling down a tower during basic training despite a real fear of heights, and not in the classroom. “Being where I’m from and where I want to reach toward, quitting is not an option,” he said.
The summer after his freshman year, he studied abroad at the University of Cambridge in an international program that drew students from around the world.
“The cultural knowledge and understanding I got from that program was awesome and so well worth it,” he said.
The trip carried personal weight. McDonald was born in England before his family settled in the United States, so it returned him, briefly, to his birthplace. He flew home two weeks before reporting for AIT. The following summer, around his annual training, he studied abroad again in Brussels, where he concentrated on his International Relations coursework and traveled to a new country every weekend, from Denmark to Morocco.
Looking ahead, McDonald is aiming for a national security role as an intelligence analyst in Washington, D.C., a path that joins his desire to serve with the analytical work he trained for at JMC.
“Critical thinking, analytical skills and presenting. Those are the key tenets of being an intelligence analyst, and that’s what I learned to do at James Madison,” he said.
He credits mentors along the way, particularly JMC Career Services Director Karissa Chabot-Purchase, who connected him to a Madison career exposure trip in D.C. and flagged recruiters and events that fit his goals.
His momentum is not letting up. McDonald deploys in October for a year-long National Guard assignment, and plans to pursue a master’s in security and intelligence studies, online, while he’s there. He intends to switch into military intelligence afterward and pursue the security clearance that field requires.
He has measured every step along the way against the same question: “How bad do you want to be in the position you want to be in later in life, and what are you willing to sacrifice to reach it?”
This story originally appeared on the James Madison College website.
