Today’s Project 100 memory comes from Mark Walter.  He was born and raised in Somers Point, New Jersey.  His mother, who graduated from Glassboro State College, was an elementary school teacher.  His father worked in the casino industry for 41 years.  He retired shortly after helping to set up the Hard Rock Casino Atlantic City.  He has one younger brother who also graduated from Rowan.  He now lives in Florida and is a physical education teacher.  Mark attended public schools and graduated from Mainland Regional High School in 2004.  After graduating from Rowan in 2008, he found himself in a tough job market.  However, he got a dream job, teaching 9^th grade world history at Egg Harbor Township High School.  He taught there for eight years.  During this time, he earned a Master’s in School Administration from Rowan.  As soon as he completed this degree, he became a vice principal at the same school, which he did for four years.  He never liked his work in administration and began requesting to go back to the classroom, which they allowed him to in 2019.  He has been back teaching 9^th grade world history since then.  He was responsible for two major projects during his time at Egg Harbor Township High School.  The first one is a school-wide competition called The Freshmen Challenge, a capstone experience for freshmen students that involves a wide variety of challenges, both academic and non-academic.  Mark was one of the originators of this program, which has grown over the years and has returned after a pause during the pandemic.   He continues in the present to play a lead role in the organizing of The Freshman Challenge.  Mark’s second project was born out his love for the National Parks.  He began by starting a Hiking Club, which focused on local hikes.  However, it grew in popularity, and he took it to another level for Spring Break in 2023.  In April, he led a group of 21 students and adult chaperones on six-day trip to Utah and Arizona where they hiked Grand Canyon National Park, Bryce National Park, and Zion Canyon National Park.  It was a stressful but successful trip, and he imagines leading a similar trip every two or three years going forward. 

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I wanted to be a history teacher.  I looked at a few different state colleges, but I took a campus tour of Rowan, and it was love at first sight.  I thought it was beautiful, and it was exactly the kind of place that I wanted for my college experience.  I never ended up applying to the other colleges.

My first year was foundational for me.  First, I was lucky to find a great circle of friends. Second, I had your class, Dr. Carrigan, United States History to 1865.  That class opened my eyes to what a college class could be.  I loved the approach to history in that class, one that I would discover in my later history classes as well.  At the same time, in another history class with an adjunct professor, I failed my first test.  That got my attention in a different way.  The two experiences together, along with my great circle of friends who enjoyed studying and talking about history outside of class, led me to become a much better student.

In my sophomore year, I joined two groups outside of the classroom that profoundly shaped my time at Rowan.  First, I began working for Admissions as a Tour Guide.  In my junior year, I was named Tour Guide of the Year.  I made great friends and enjoyed my time as a tour guide immensely.  The fact that enrollment expanded during my time at Rowan can’t be mere coincidence!  Second, I joined the Student History Association (SHA) and soon became an officer in that organization.  My work in SHA (and later Phi Alpha Theta) led me to participate in many events outside of the classroom, and it led to many great friendships and professional connections that persist to this day.

I took two other classes with you, Dr. Carrigan, specifically Historical Methods and Civil War and Reconstruction.  I took Dr. Morschauser’s Ancient Egypt class, and I still use my notes from that class in my teaching.  The same thing is true for my notes from Edward Wang’s Modern Japan.  All of my professors were awesome, and I just wish that I could have taken more of their courses. Given my teaching responsibilities today, I especially wish I had taken classes with Dr. Blake and Dr. Heinzen. 

During my last three years at Rowan, I was one of your research assistants.  Most of the time, we searched for lynching stories on microfilm reels to help confirm cases for your dataset.  While this was interesting at times, the great highlight for me was our trip to Texas to do archival research for this project.  I had never travelled like that before, had hardly left the East Coast. I have great memories of the trip, even when our van broke down in Tennessee.  I remember stopping at the Parthenon in Nashville on the drive to Texas.  I remember great dinners at night with my fellow students.  The days spent in the archives were also eye opening.  The experience doing that work has remained helpful to me in my current teaching.  We visited the Lyndon Johnson Presidential Library on the trip, and I took a photo of the chairs that LBJ stole from Hollybush and put on display.  The Admissions Office put that photo on its website for a time.  One great memory I have is driving a tractor on your father’s farm.  I remember that Cara, one of my fellow research assistants, refused to get on the tractor.  I still own the book that came out of the research, Forgotten Dead, and I am proud that my name is featured in the acknowledgements.

The four years of my life at Rowan were defining.  I had a great experience there.  Not only did I gain everything I needed to be able to get a job teaching history just like I wanted, I was fortunate to meet fantastic friends and to have caring and engaged professors.  I have no regrets.  Nothing can compare to getting married and having children, but those four years were special to me.

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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/