Today’s Project 100 memory comes from Amy Osterhout.  She was born and raised in Marlton, New Jersey.  Her father is a mechanical engineer, and her mother is a Registered Nurse who currently works in an oncology office.  She has a younger brother who works at a bike shop and plays music in multiple bands.  She went to public schools and graduated from Cherokee High School in 2013.  After graduating from Rowan University in 2017, she attended Rutgers University Camden and earned a Master’s degree in American history in 2019.  She then took a position as Program Manager at the Crossroads of the American Revolution National Heritage Area.  Her offices were located in the Old Barracks Museum in Trenton, New Jersey.  Her position included working with all 200 of New Jersey’s Revolutionary war sites.  She then worked as Manager of Events at the Rosenbach Museum & Library for a period of time before accepting a job offer as Project Analyst at Noblis MSD.

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I had dreams of going to California or Texas and leaving New Jersey during my college years.  However, my parents pushed for me to attend Rowan University since it was so much more affordable than schools outside of the state.  Given that it was close enough to commute, the difference in cost was indeed dramatic.  I was also greatly impressed by Rowan’s small class sizes.  In addition, I already had a great love of New Jersey history from my father.  On many weekends, he took us to museums and historic sites.  When I was younger, I had a wonderful time on those trips.  During my early teenage years, I rebelled against them, but, by the time, I was deciding where to go to college, I had gotten past that stage and was again appreciating those trips and history in general.  My parents also noted that they would be fine with my majoring in something that could make me a lot of money or in just a subject that I loved.  With that encouragement, I chose history over English as my major and began at Rowan in the Fall of 2013.

One of the most valuable things to me about my Rowan experience was the CLIO program.  As a first-year student, I was fortunate to be able to take two survey classes with other history majors.  Each class only had about total of 25 students.  This made the experience and the discussions so much richer and deeper than it would have been otherwise.  I didn’t fully appreciate this until I was a teaching assistant at Rutgers for a survey class that had only two or three history majors out of 80 students.  The experience that those students got was so much different from the one that I received, thanks to the CLIO program.

I also had a great social experience at Rowan due, in part, to the CLIO program.  Because the classes were small, and we had so many classes together, many of us became fast friends.  In some cases, such as that of Emily Grenier, those friendships endured graduation.  I still see Emily on a weekly basis, and we first met in CLIO.

The faculty in Rowan’s history department were outstanding.  William Carrigan was a great professor to have a first-year student.  He was welcoming, supportive, and so excited about what he was teaching.  Scott Morschauser was a spell-binding lecturer.  I looked forward to each and every one of his classes, even though he was a difficult grader and remembering the details necessary to do well on his exams was a challenge.  I greatly appreciated the level of commitment to teaching demonstrated by Melissa Klapper.  She demanded much of her students, including an attention to detail with facts and grammar.  Moreover, she emphasized that your writing display logical and critical thinking.  The skills that I learned in her classes allowed me to be a successful undergraduate student and then graduate student.  I recognize even more now how valuable were those things she taught me.

Another great experience at Rowan that I didn’t fully appreciate until I went to graduate school was the Senior Seminar requirement.  Many of my peers at Rutgers had never written a paper longer than five pages and were shocked by being asked to write a thirty-page paper.  Thanks to my Seminar class with Lee Kress, I was more than ready for this challenge.

I spent a lot of time in the History Department office, and all of the faculty were so willing to just chat with me. They helped me work through whatever paper I was writing at the time or to discuss the possibilities of going to graduate school.  I had a great experience at Rowan, and I really left the University feeling confident about the skills I possessed.  Even though public history was a challenging field to enter, I believed that I was prepared to navigate that path thanks to the history faculty. 

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This is part of the Department of History’s “Project 100,” the collection and sharing of one hundred memories by Glassboro State College and Rowan University alumni and staff in celebration of the 100^th anniversary of the founding of Glassboro Normal School, later Glassboro State College, and now Rowan University.  Thanks to Laurie Lahey for helping proofread and edit the final versions.  Email carrigan@rowan.edu with questions or corrections.  You can find the Link to all of the Project 100 entries on the Web:  https://chss.rowan.edu/departments/history/alumni_highlights/project_100/