While working in the movie industry in his 1916 summer vacation, Hawks made an attempt to change schools to Stanford University. He was not let in. He went to Cornell that September. He left in April 1917 to join the Army when the United States joined World War I. Like a lot of students who joined the armed services in the war, he got a degree in absentia in 1918. Before Hawks went to war, he went back to Hollywood and by the end of April 1917 was working on a Cecil B. DeMille movie.