Today’s Project 100 entry comes from Jason Rindosh.  He was born in Mount Holly and raised in Easthampton, New Jersey.  His mother was a teacher in a Catholic school, but she became a homemaker once she had children, five in the end.  Jason was the second-born.  She got back into the workforce once the youngest ones were in school, beginning as a substitute teacher and eventually becoming a full-time teacher’s aide at Burlington County Institute of Technology, where she still works.  His father was an engineer by trade, but he ended up in business management and sales.  He worked in Philadelphia, and he is now retired.  Jason attended public schools and graduated from Rancocas Valley Regional High School in 2004.  After graduating from Rowan in 2008 with degrees in history and philosophy, he entered Seton Hall Law School, gaining his law degree in 2012.  He passed the New Jersey and New York bar exams.  From 2012 to 2013, he was a clerk for Judge Lourdes Santiago in Hudson County Superior Court, Civil Division.  After the clerkship, he learned civil rights and employment law while working for Louis Zayas.  In 2014, he started his own firm with a fellow Seton Hall law school graduate named Prabhkaran S. Bedi.  Most of the firm’s work is general civil litigation, representing a wide variety of groups, including small business owners and information technology firms.  The firm also does civil rights cases even though they are less lucrative than other practice areas.  He is most proud of his work on a racial profiling case in Hackensack.  The civil rights lawsuit was referenced by the judge when he dismissed the criminal indictment against the individuals.

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I actually didn’t even want to go to college when I graduated high school. I had a job at a country club at the time, and I loved that job, but my dad said that I had to go to college for four years and live on campus.  I actually had lower grades than my siblings, but I got into most of the schools to which I applied. 

So, if I was going to college, I knew that I wanted to stay in New Jersey.  I had a fine visit to Rowan, and they gave me a better scholarship than Rutgers.  I originally thought that I wanted to be a teacher, and the College of Education had a good reputation, so I chose to go to Rowan. I was able to continue my job at the country club as well! 

I began as a history and secondary education major.  I wasn’t really into academics in high school, but I always loved history.  I found it fascinating to figure out the origins of things.  I remember that learning about the history of a place could transform the way that you felt about a particular location, and I liked that transformative power of the subject.  Regarding teaching, my parents always said that teaching was the best job.  They said that New Jersey teachers were fairly well paid and had good benefits, but they also had time off in the summer and did fulfilling work, as long as one liked working with kids.

I worked in the History Department as one of the student workers, and I remember when an important speaker came to campus.  The Department’s administrative assistant, Denise Williams, was involved in the visit, and she had arranged for her own mother to come to campus to hear the speaker.  She was in the office at the same time with me, and we had a brief conversation, in which she found out that I was going to law school.  I remember that she told me to “make sure you are a good lawyer, one for the people.”  It was just a small moment overall, but it had a big impact on me. I still think about that conversation all the time, and you could argue that it has been an important guide to me for all these years.

I had Scott Morschauser for Historical Methods, and that class was by far the most memorable of all my classes.  It was not about particular content, but it was about how to approach sources and how to do research.  He taught me how to evaluate bias, and the lessons that I learned in that class I still use all the time in my work as a lawyer. 

David Applebaum was my first and last professor.  His always showed the “other side” of history, and I was shocked when I first had him.  For my seminar paper with Professor Applebaum, I worked on a paper on the rise of the dictator Augusto Pinochet.  I won the best paper award for that essay, which I proudly received from Dr. Morschauser at the end of the year history banquet. 

One of the other memorable things about my time at Rowan involved the Philosophy Department.  I had many great classes in that Department, especially with Dr. Matthew Lund.  I enjoyed his Nordic teaching style, which was very chill.  I just enjoyed how he ran the class.  I remember my capstone paper was on anti-realism.  I helped restart the Philosophy club, and I was also supportive of the Department’s proposal to create a full major in philosophy.  We ran into some resistance from the new Provost, and Dr. Lund was a great advocate for us.  I was the second philosophy major to graduate, following a winter graduation of the club’s president who had also helped with the major proposal.

To make room for the philosophy major, I decided to drop the education part of my degree.  I did this mostly because I was really enjoying learning in my history and philosophy classes.  I wanted to take more of those classes, and I didn’t feel the same about most of my education classes.  One of the education faculty that I really liked, however, was Beth Wassell.  She was a really great professor, and graciously included me in her academic research.  I ended up co-presenting and co-authoring a paper as a result of my work with her.  Despite my positive experience with Dr. Wassell, I still left education.  My parents were not very happy with this decision.  I looked up what history and philosophy majors did for careers, and law came up, and that was how I got started down that path.

My preparation at Rowan ended up being superb, something that I only truly appreciated after I entered law school and discovered that I was better prepared than many of my classmates who had gone to more prestigious and selective colleges.

I had a great experience at Rowan.  Looking back now, it was the best schooling experience of my life.  I learned more in those four years than I ever learned at any other time.  When I started, I was more of a blue-collar person.  When I graduated, I was obsessed with reading and learning.  I credit the faculty at Rowan. They were so smart, talented, and dedicated.  They gave so much information, and they were also easy to speak to outside of the classroom. The classes were all small, and I know that I got a great education. 

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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/