Today’s Project 100 memory comes from Emily Grenier.  She was born in Christiana, Delaware, but she grew up in Woodstown, New Jersey.  Her father enlisted in the United States Navy when he was younger.  After leaving the service, he primarily worked at the Salem Nuclear Power Plant in several different roles, though he is now a home inspector.  Her mother, an alum of Glassboro State College—and its History Department—is a teacher, primarily of elementary school age children.  She has an older brother who went to North Carolina State University and a younger sister who went St. Joseph’s University.  She went to Catholic schools, and she graduated from Paul VI High School in 2014.  After graduating from Rowan in 2018, she entered the University of Delaware where she earned a M.A. in American History with a graduate certificate in Museum Studies.  She finished her degree in the middle of the pandemic in 2020, when no museum was hiring.  Even when hiring restarted, it was a very difficult job market.  She eventually earned a part-time job for the Christ Church Preservation Trust as an educator.  She then got a second part-time educator job at the Museum of the American Revolution. In 2022, the Museum’s Development Department hired her full-time, and she now works there as the Membership Manager.

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I applied to several colleges, and I was admitted to Villanova University and Fordham University.  I thought that I wanted to go to Villanova, but it was very expensive.  So, I ended up choosing to go to Rowan University because they offered me a great scholarship based on my SAT score.  It was such a good deal that I basically got my entire degree from Rowan for free, including living on campus for two of the four years.

I began at Rowan as a history major because my parents had long taken me on trips to visit historic sites and museums in New Jersey and all over the East Coast.  I always loved learning about the past and visiting museums.  I didn’t really see myself as a future teacher.  I just knew that I loved studying history.

The best thing about the History Department at Rowan was how engaged the faculty were with the students.  We had small classes, and the faculty were involved in the clubs and the honors societies.  It was easy to meet and become friends with my fellow history majors as well because the classes were small.  The CLIO program was really helpful as well in the transition to college. Without that program, I would probably not have had full-time faculty members in that first year.  In retrospect, that was an important part of the Rowan experience for me.  I also only really came to appreciate how special and important were the small classes and the faculty involvement when I went to the University of Delaware and experienced a different dynamic in the History Department and much larger classes.

I really enjoyed all of my classes in the History Department.  Dr. Carrigan’s class led me to a different way of seeing history itself.  Dr. Hague’s classes on British history were always the highlight of my week.  I also got a lot out of Dr. Duke-Bryant’s African Nationalist Movements course.  It was a totally new and fascinating topic, and I got to use my French for research.  I really enjoyed Dr. Heinzen’s classes on Russian history.  One of my strongest memories was being in Dr. Heinzen’s 8am class the day after the 2016 election.  We were in the worst classroom on campus, a windowless room in the Esby Gymnasium that smelled like chlorine and sweat.  Many of us were depressed, and the topic of the class for the day was the failed “Going to the People” movement in Tsarist Russia, led by students looking to inspire a revolt of the peasant class, only to have their hopes and dreams promptly crushed.  It was surreal, to say the very least. 

I got involved with several communities during my time at Rowan, including the Student History Association and Phi Alpha Theta.  I really enjoyed being a tutor at the Writing Center.  It helped me improve my ability to both work as a part of a team of tutors, and I really enjoyed getting to know students from different majors.  My time as a writing tutor also helped me come out of my shell; I’d always thought of myself as an introvert, but I suddenly found it easy to talk about things I was passionate about—writing, language, stories.  I learned that I loved sharing knowledge with others, and while I still had no plans to become a teacher, I started to think about pursuing a doctorate in history or a museum career.

On the academic side, in addition to being in the Honors program, I added a second major in philosophy, and I certainly enjoyed my classes and the faculty in that department.  In my philosophy classes and my history classes, I had really begun to focus on European history and thought, moving away from my original love of local history and American history.  Related to this was my French minor, which was meaningful to me as my ancestors came from Quebec.  I studied abroad in Paris for the spring semester in 2017, and that was an interesting experience.  The French have a different relationship with history than Americans—there’s more of it, I suppose, and everything is so old over there.  I had gone to France thinking that I might want to study French history at the doctoral level, but the trip led me to rethink this plan.  Thankfully, Paris is a great place to have an existential crisis. 

This rethinking continued during and after another great trip that I took as an undergraduate, namely a field trip to Fort Ticonderoga in the Spring of 2018.  It was a full-circle moment for me, as I really came back to my love of American history.  Indeed, Fort Ticonderoga with its connections to French Canada, the British Atlantic, and the world of material culture in general reoriented my thoughts about graduate school.  I returned to Fort Ticonderoga in the summer of 2019 as the Edward W. Pell Graduate Fellow in Academic Programs.  This was during the middle of my M.A. degree at Delaware and further convinced me of a career in public history.

The single most important thing I learned as a history major at Rowan was that there are many ways of “doing history.”  Some people conduct research and write books about history, some teach history in classrooms, some conserve objects and curate museum exhibits, some bring history to life through costumed interpretation—these are all valid methods to learn more about the past.  I had never considered having a career in development and fundraising, but I have come to see it as another way of “doing history;” especially in museums, it makes all the other work possible. 

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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/