Today’s Project 100 memory comes from Jose Calves.  He grew up in Princeton Junction, New Jersey.  His father was born in Havana, Cuba, and came to New York in 1960 due to the Revolution.  His mother was born in the Bronx of Puerto Rican descent.  They never met in New York.  They only met after both of their employers relocated to New Jersey in the 1980s.  He went to the public schools in West Windsor and graduated in 2007 from West Windsor-Plainsboro High School South.  He has six siblings.  After graduating from Rowan in 2012, he worked for the Senate campaign of Joe Kyrillos for a year.  The following year he began law school at George Washington University.  He graduated and passed the bar in 2016.  He clerked for an appellate district judge for a year, and then worked for several law firms.  Today, he is Labor and Employment Associate at Brown and Connery in Westmont, New Jersey.  He is very involved in civic life.  He serves as the  Vice President of the Southern Region for the New Jersey Hispanic Bar Association and is a member of the Camden County Bar Association Board of Trustees.  He is a member of the Rowan University Alumni Board of Directors, the Haddon Township Planning Board and the Public Participation Task Force of the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Committee.

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When I graduated high school, I was interested in being a history teacher, and I didn’t want to go the College of New Jersey or Rutgers University because they were too close to my family.  I was advised to consider Rowan by a guidance counselor, and I was torn between Rowan and Gettysburg College.  I ended up choosing Rowan because of the Community of Learning in Operation (CLIO) program, which I learned about in an email from Dr. Carrigan after I was accepted. 

Because of CLIO, I ended up getting involved in the Student History Association.  I was already, however, a joiner by this stage of my life because I had become involved with Freemasonry in high school.  In the Spring semester of my first year, I joined Washington Lodge #59 in Philadelphia.  This did not keep me from being involved in lots of things at Rowan, where I was a Resident Assistant and a member of Tau Kappa Epsilon.  I liked being involved in all of these things because I liked meeting people. 

Later, I became an officer in the history honors society, Phi Alpha Theta.  What I really liked about Phi Alpha Theta was delivering a paper at the annual regional conference.  I loved the whole process leading up to the presentation.  I enjoyed the research, the writing, and the debating with my professor over my findings.  I found the actual presentation in front of my peers and faculty to be very rewarding as well, and I won an award for best paper at that conference.

After student teaching, I learned that I did like working with kids, but the job lacked some of what I liked best about being a history major, especially the discussion and intellectual debate that emerged with informed research.  I briefly considering pursuing a doctorate in history, but some faculty members recommended that I consider law school instead.  After a year of working in politics, I followed that advice.  I found that being a history major prepared me very well for this endeavor.  The type of research, writing, and debate that I did as an undergraduate helped me succeed in law school in my subsequent legal career.

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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/