From Game Console to Quantum Code: How the Navy and PBSC Rewired One Veteran’s Mindset

In high school, Tyler Kollinger’s ambitions extended about as far as the next video game level. College was an obligation, not an opportunity. He went through orientation at Palm Beach State College in 2014, took one look at the path ahead and decided it wasn’t for him.

“My mom told me I needed to go to school or get a job,” he recalled. “So I saw a commercial for the Navy and decided to join.”

That impulse decision sent him on an 11-year journey in uniform that would ultimately bring him back to the same community college with a radically different mindset. The difference, he says, is simple: the military taught him how to learn.

Kollinger, now 29, spent a little over eight years on active duty and remains in the Navy Reserve. As an aviation electronics technician, he worked on a ship in dry dock in Virginia, performing the painstaking maintenance and rebuilding needed before it deployed to Japan. Later, stationed in Italy, he traveled to 15 countries and took on calibration work that demanded a strong grasp of physics.

Italy also gave him a front-row seat to history. When refugees fled Kabul, his base was transformed into a camp. “Our entire base there was turned into a refugee camp,” he said. “We did a lot of humanitarian service missions.” The experience, he added, sharpened his sense that he wanted more control over his own future. “I decided to return to the U.S. because as far as I could tell the Navy couldn’t offer me anything new. I wanted to take control of my life instead of having people tell me what to do.”

Back in Florida, he enrolled at Palm Beach State with one modest goal: get a degree and see where it led. This time, everything felt different.

“In high school, I just played video games and didn’t really put any effort into school or care about my grades,” he said. “I had no desire to be better until after the military.”

What changed was his threshold for effort. “In the military nothing is an option, you have to do it regardless, so I took that mindset and applied it to school,” he said. “Bad grades were never an option. Now I see A’s as a bare minimum. Sometimes it takes more work for some courses than others but it is my recipe for success.”

At Palm Beach State, that discipline met opportunity. Kollinger entered TRiO’s veteran-focused support program and the Dr. Floyd F. Koch Honors College, eventually serving as president of its student advisory council. He juggled classes with a job at the college’s Veterans Success Center while drilling with the reserves.​

Academically, his Navy experience in calibration and electronics nudged him toward a new obsession: the intersection of physics, computing and artificial intelligence. “AI was everywhere, so I wanted to find a way to mix the two by working with quantum computers and AI,” he said. “I only figured this out Fall 2024.”

There were still hurdles. “PBSC Professor Roy Boulware did what I would previously have thought impossible back in high school,” Kollinger said. “He helped me to love math. In high school math was my worst subject and now I spend a lot of time studying it. I could not have done it without Professor Boulware. Also, almost every tutor at PBSC’s Student Learning Center were with me every step of the way as well.”

The payoff came in an acceptance letter from the University of Colorado’s computer science and engineering program, where Kollinger plans to major in computer science and engineering and double minor in quantum engineering and Japanese. He has long been fascinated by Japan—“Ever since I was about 8 years old … I would always pick out Japanese videos,” he said—and has already begun teaching himself the language.​

An academic excellence scholarship and veterans’ benefits add up to a full ride.​

“When picking a career it is important to find what you are really interested in and of course something that will pay the bills,” Kollinger said. “But it’s also really critical to find a career that will be sustainable.”

For a former teenager who once drifted through school, that might be the most radical change of all: not just doing the work but building a life around the learning itself.