Today’s Project 100 memory comes from Gillian Moore.  She was born in Vineland and raised in Millville, New Jersey.  Her father worked for Wawa Management in Pennsylvania, retiring in 2015.  Her mother is an accountant and currently works for a glass company in Vineland.  She attended Catholic schools, beginning at St. Magdalen.  They closed when she was in fifth grade, and she then completed middle school at Bishop Schad before attending St. Joseph’s in Hammonton for high school, graduating in 2019 as the class valedictorian.  She entered Rowan that Fall, graduating four years later in the Spring of 2023 with degrees in history and subject matter education. She also completed the Honors concentration and won several awards, including the Marius Livingston scholarship in 2022 and four separate Medallions – one in history, one in secondary education, one in Honors, and the University-wide Thomas E. Robinson Medallion for Leadership.  In April, the Delsea Regional High School District hired her to teach middle school social studies at Delsea Middle School.  She began teaching in the Fall. 

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I applied to several colleges, mostly all in New Jersey.  I knew that I wanted to be a teacher, so it made sense to apply to in-state colleges.  I didn’t think initially I would attend Rowan.  My friends also thought that I would go somewhere else because of my class rank.  However, when I went on my campus visit, it was the first place that I could really see myself attending.  This was even more remarkable because my tour took place in the pouring rain.  I just had a good time on that tour. I also really liked the fact that it had a long history of training teachers, and the distance to home felt right.  Even with living on campus, it was also the most affordable of my options.

I chose to major in history, but it was a bit of an afterthought.  My main goal was to be a teacher, but I did like history.  I thought it was an interesting subject, but I did not initially see it as anything more than the subject that I fit into the subject matter education degree.  My appreciation for history, however, changed dramatically once I began taking college-level history courses, which were quite different than the ones that I had had in high school.

Looking back now, my first semester was a gauntlet as I had both your class, Dr. Carrigan, which required a lot of reading, and also the very challenging and information-rich Western Civilization course taught by Dr. Morschauser.  The next semester was even more challenging because Dr. Carrigan talked me into taking his honors course, team-taught with Dr. Luke Holbrook, on Jared Diamond.  That course, “Biology, History, and the Fate of Human Societies,” required even more work and was filled with bright upperclassmen.  Not only did surviving that class greatly improve my skills, but it helped me understand Eurocentrism and global history in a new and more profound way. 

I had only a semester and a half before covid hit.  I remember when the email came that said Rowan was extending Spring Break for a week.  It was a beautiful day, and everyone was outside enjoying the sun.  People were excited about an extra week off.  Then, things changed in a short period of time.  I think it was only a few days later that the email came notifying us that Rowan would actually be online for the rest of the semester.  Parents started coming to pick up their children, and I felt like I was the last person on campus in the end.  I went back to Millville, and I stayed there for month after month.

Once I started taking classes online, I felt lucky that my degree was one that translated decently to the online format.  It wasn’t the same, but I could still listen to lectures.  I had a hard time imagining how other programs, ones with laboratories or ones in the performing arts would adapt on the fly.  During this period, I just sat at my dining room table and opened up my Rowan Blackboard.  Most of my classes were completely asynchronous.  The only one that had “meetings” was your honors class, Dr. Carrigan, and we met via Google Meet.  I actually planned my schedule so that I was doing the reading or assignments for each class during the time that I would have been sitting in the class.  I moved around my house to different locations just to vary things up (and sometimes to avoid my other family members since we were all at home and it was loud at times).  Not all of my professors were equally adept at online teaching.  My older astronomy professor did not use Blackboard but just sent us emails with instructions to find things on the internet. He said he was going to email us a final exam.  He never did.  I got an A. 

One of the things that I remember from the pandemic was “Coffee with Carrigan.”  This was an hour-long virtual meeting that was not part of any class.  I believe that you came up with the idea just to replace some of the lost social interaction we would have had in person, and Dr Carrigan invited students and even recent alums to join.  We chatted about how we were doing, and Dr. Carrigan answered questions about Rowan’s shifting pandemic policies.  Dr. Carrigan usually ended the hour with some type of trivia game, at which I wish I had done better.  It was my first real indication of how much Rowan professors cared about us.  Dr. Carrigan knew that we were all going through an isolating experience and thought that it might be helpful. I did not yet drink coffee however, so I had tea. 

The pandemic did not end with that semester, but Rowan allowed us to move back on campus in the Fall, which I did.  That semester all of my classes were online, and I took them from my dormitory room.  It was a much better environment for me than my home for studying.  I took two history courses, Historical Methods with Jody Manning and World History with Dr. Gedacht.  Taking Methods would have been hard in any circumstance, but it was even harder online. Face-to-face discussion would have been helpful.  We didn’t know what we were doing, and it would have been great to be able to work in groups.  Professor Manning did everything that he could, but it was still a challenging environment for that class.  The entire year was just strange.  Most students did not live on campus.  Events run by the Student Government Association were virtual.

I was relieved when things returned to something close to normality in my junior year.  I loved being back in the classroom.  I tried my best to revive the Student History Association and Phi Alpha Theta.  That was challenging as people were still scared of doing things and used to not doing things.  I took two history classes in the Fall, Modern Latin America and British History to 1715.  My professor for the British history class, Dr. Grussenmeyer, came in dressed as a Tudor knight.  Dr. Sharnak discussed social and political movements.  My papers for those two classes were very different.  In the second semester of my junior year, I took Senior Seminar with Dr. Sharnak.  It was my second class with her, and I am most proud of the paper that I wrote for that class.  I would later present that paper – “Marching with the Madres: United States Governmental Perceptions of and Interactions with Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo during the Argentine Terrismo de Estado”— in the undergraduate “lighting round” session at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association in Philadelphia.

Dr. Sharnak is awesome.  She is a mentor to me in every way.  She is a model as a historian and as a person.  As an example, she decided that something I had come across in the archives could be a future publication.  She then invited me to co-author that publication with her, as she wanted to show me how to do this work and to give me a true archival experience, something that she did not have as an undergraduate.  We have now been to several archives together now, including ones at Rutgers New Brunswick, Columbia University, and the Brooklyn Historical Society.  Dr. Sharnak’s faith in me, and her willingness to devote time to my mentorship, has filled me with much confidence.  I can’t say enough of about her dedication. 

I joined the Student History Association in my very first semester, and I went to various events sponsored by the SHA and Phi Alpha Theta. I liked the people who were leading the organizations at this time.  I agreed to serve as an office in my sophomore year, but we did almost nothing due to covid.  During my junior year, I was vice-president, but it was still a struggle.  In my senior year, I became President of Phi Alpha Theta, and we successfully got back to having in-person meetings and events.  I was student teaching, so I give a lot of credit to my fellow e-board members.  We had a great end of the year banquet, and I am very happy that I left the two organizations again fully functioning after being an officer during two very hard years for the clubs. 

Dr. Hague’s “Hobbits and Bohemians” course was one of the most fascinating classes that I have ever taken.  It combined history and literature and was demanding, especially when you were tapped to lead two hours of discussion.  The final exam could take any form that you wanted, but you had to use the assigned texts and answer the question, “how should you live in the modern world?”  I wrote a fictional short story from the point of view of Judith Shakespeare from Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own.”  In my story, Judith snuck into our classes each week and commented on the various discussions that we had.  I went way over the word count and wrote it while battling my first dose of the covid vaccine.  Despite this, Dr. Hague was effusive in his praise, which made me very happy.

During the summer of 2022, I went to Germany, Poland, Czechia, and Austria for a study abroad experience focused on the Holocaust with Professors Jody Manning, Emily Blanck, and Mikkel Dack.  It was one of the most eye-opening experiences that I have ever had.  It is one thing to learn about the history of terrible atrocities, but it is quite something else to study that history in the places where those atrocities took place.  It was the first time that I had ever left the United States.  Being able to go on that trip with friends that I had made in the Rowan history department was remarkable and something for which I am very grateful.  It gave me quite a travel bug, and I can’t wait to be able to return to Europe and to visit other historic places. 

My student teaching experience was both one of the most challenging and one of the most rewarding experiences of my entire education.  I had 110 eighth-graders.  This solidified that I was indeed crazy for wanting to teach this age range.  I, however, discovered that my Rowan history courses did in fact prepare me very well to be able to teach these students.  I loved teaching them.  I had always wanted to be a teacher because of some of the great teachers that I had had in my life.  Being able to be on the other side and to form similar relationships with students was very special and rewarding to me.  I got a simple letter from one of those students at the end of the year.  It was her first year in New Jersey, having moved from Connecticut, and she said that I had made her year much better, something that she did not think was possible when the year began. 

I was very fortunate to be asked to be the student speaker at my graduation.  I never thought when I began at Rowan that I would ever be asked to do such a thing.  By the time that I got the invitation, however, I felt well prepared to do so.  In fact, writing and delivering that speech was a lot easier than devising an effective lesson plan and carrying it out with 8^th graders.  The audience was happy to be there and in a good mood, something you can by no means count on every day with 8^th graders! 

Although it has only been a few months since I graduated, I have thought a lot about my time at Rowan.  Shortly after I graduated, I wrote a “letter to Rowan” in my daily journal.  I was quite sad in some ways to be graduating.  I wrote that I was forever changed by my time at Rowan.  I knew that I was quite a different person than when I began, and I am forever grateful that Rowan gave me the space and support that I need to grow as a historian, a teacher, and as a person.

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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/