Business schools are now reaching out to military officers, saying veterans lend leadership experience and global perspective to classroom discussions.

In The Wall Street Journal, Scott Poitevent of the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business (a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and the Naval Postgraduate School as well as a nine-year veteran who served two tours each in Iraq and Afghanistan) was interviewed about the prospects for other veterans in business school.

WSJ: What skills do veterans bring to the classroom?

Mr. Poitevent: We know how to plug into a team environment and cut through personal differences, cultural differences.

People with military experience have more stories about how they had to use influence rather than authority to achieve a goal in an organization, whereas everybody thinks we just tell people to do [something] and they jump to it.

WSJ: To whom did you turn for advice on the admission process?

Mr. Poitevent: I mostly talked with friends [from the Navy]. Nobody could speak from a mentorship perspective, but when I started looking at Darden, the military association here reached out and provided that dialogue that might have been missing from the more formal environment in the Navy.

It’s a little bit harder to say in an application, “This is where I see myself going, this is how an M.B.A. fits in my overall plan.” Obviously, we’re not going back into the service. It’s about crafting that story.

WSJ: Were there challenges in settling back into school?

Mr. Poitevent: The thing for me was recognizing that I’m in a very deep minority now as a veteran. It was my responsibility to figure out how to work on a team in a civilian setting.

There’s a lack of perspective that can sometimes be a little frustrating. This isn’t unique to an M.B.A. program but rather a more general transition challenge. We’ve spent the last however many years [deployed], we lose some really important people, and some [civilians] don’t even realize that we still have people in Afghanistan. It can come in very isolated moments, but bringing diplomacy to that can be a challenge.

WSJ: What does the Darden Military Association do to support other veterans?

Mr. Poitevent: We do interview workshops, we get folks on the phone with alumni, and we work on recruiting the next class.

[We brought] the student body together to film a Veterans Day hello video for one of our classmates [last month]. He had to put his M.B.A. pursuits on hold to go on a yearlong deployment for the Army National Guard.