This week’s Project 100+ memory comes from Megan Meiler.  She was born and raised in West Deptford.  She attended public schools and graduated from West Deptford High School in 2003.  Her father owned a service station until 2008, when the Great Recession forced the family to close the business.  He then began working for Riehl’s Towing, where he still works today.  Megan’s mother worked at the service station until it was sold.  She then took a job at Budd’s Pools where she continues to work in customer service.  Although her mother had finished 5^th in her high school class, she did not go to college.  Megan was the first person in her immediate family to have a college degree.  Her older brother eventually got an Associate of Art’s degree, but, in 2008, Megan earned her Bachelor of Art’s degree in history and secondary education from Rowan before he finished.  At Rowan, she served as President of the Student History Association and then as President of Phi Alpha Theta for two years.  By the end of her senior year, she had earned two awards from the Department of History, the Marius Livingston Award and the Gary Hunter Medallion for Excellence in History.  After graduating, she sent out applications everywhere and landed a position at Penns Grove High School teaching history, sociology, and geography.  She is completing her sixteenth year at Penns Grove, and she has held a wide variety of positions outside of the classroom, including coach of cheerleading, advisor for the Student Congress, coordinator for Student Activities, advisor for the Future Educators of America club, overseer of the Achieve Beyond program (which is the school’s nighttime initiative for at risk students), and director of the Transition Project, which oversees the peer leadership program and helps incoming freshmen and transfer students.  In addition to teaching, Megan runs an online baking business – Meiler Made, LLC.  This is something that she loves to do, though supplemental income is, of course, something important to most teachers.  The tag line for her business is “Sweets, Treats, and Healthy Eats.”  Her biggest sellers are protein balls, but she also sells lots of brownies, cookies, and cupcakes.  It is a local business, and she makes all her own deliveries.  She hopes one day to have her own food truck, but her main problem, she says, is that there are only 24 hours in a day.

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I knew from middle school that I was going to college.  I liked school, and I had very good grades.  I decided that I wanted to be a teacher at this time, though I wanted to teach elementary school initially.  I didn’t apply to very many colleges.  I only applied to state colleges due to cost. I believe that I applied to Rowan, Rutgers New Brunswick, and the College of New Jersey.  Although I only finished 11^th in my class in comparison to my mother’s 5^th place finish, my record was good enough to get me into all the schools to which I applied. I knew that I wanted to stay close to home because I needed to work to help with expenses.  At age 14, I had begun working at Red Eagle Produce and Ice Cream.  I kept working there all the way through high school, then all the way through college, and then for many years after I began teaching at Penns Grove.  In addition to Rowan being close to home, I had a cousin who had a wonderful experience there and had already become an elementary school teacher by the time that I applied.  That mattered to me, much more than the tour that I took of campus.

I began as a math and education major.  I loved both math and history in high school, but I chose math because I thought it might make it easier for me to get a job.  However, I quickly realized that I didn’t really want to teach math in high school. So, I switched to history, the other subject that I had always found fascinating.

My three most memorable professors at Rowan were David Applebaum, Melissa Klapper, and Corinne Blake. 

David Applebaum’s in-class teaching was a remarkable experience.  I remember that he wrote these notes all over the board while saying “ebb and flow.”  For many of my fellow students, they did not understand how to put it all together, but I always got it and often ended up explaining it to them.  He was able to bring history alive to us by connecting whatever we were learning to something in the modern day or to some other fascinating aspect of the past. 

Without Melissa Klapper, I would not be able to write.  It was a struggle at times, but I always appreciated her time and effort to help us so much.  It really made a difference to me, and I use what she taught me all the time.  She also instilled a passion for learning about the past and present of world religions.  While I am a Christian, I loved studying Judaism with her. 

Dr. Klapper was not the only person who fueled my interest in studying religion. I remember my Islamist Movements course with Corinne Blake.  I knew so little about Islam before that course, but I became absolutely obsessed with that history due to Dr. Blake’s teaching.  Like Dr. Applebaum, she made her subject come alive to us by connecting it to current events. 

I must add a brief note about my Senior Seminar with Lee Kress.  I had a hard time finding a topic for that paper, but I eventually chose to study the United States Senate’s investigation of the government’s counter-intelligence programs run by the FBI, the CIA, and the NSA.  Chaired by Frank Church, the Senate committee uncovered activities of questionable and illegal activity targeting civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr.  Although it took me so long to find this topic and to narrow down what I was studying, I still think about this research all the time. I find myself frequently sharing bits and details with my students. 

I don’t remember how I first got involved in the Student History Association (SHA). I think that Denise Williams recommended that I get involved.  The SHA met at the same time as the honors society, Phi Alpha Theta (PAT).  You and Dr. Heinzen were the two advisors at the time.  We organized movie nights and went on local field trips. I remember one to Red Bank Battlefield.  There was also a community service requirement, which I really enjoyed completing.  I can’t remember exactly all the things that we did during these years, but I remember a food drive and a day of working at Habitat for Humanity.  I also really liked helping the new students get adjusted to college and to fit into the Department.  I loved encouraging my fellow students to present papers at the regional Phi Alpha Theta conferences.  In my senior year, we hosted the conference at Rowan.  All the work that we did to get ready and pull that conference off definitely helped me later when I had to do similar things at Penns Grove.  I remember the names of some of my fellow students who helped with all of this, including Andrea Baptiste, Gretchen Wesh Boyle, Cara Flodman, Lauren Hewitt, Dennis Mallon, and Mark Walter.  Many of us went into teaching and are still working in different schools today.

It might sound crazy, but I didn’t really realize when I graduated how much I had truly learned at Rowan.  Only after beginning to teach did I come to realize the great diversity of things I had been taught and the wide range of skills that I had learned both inside and outside the classroom.   

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This is part of the Department of History’s “Project 100+,” an ongoing collection of memories by Glassboro State College and Rowan University alumni and staff that began as part of the celebration of the 100^th anniversary of the founding of Glassboro Normal School, later Glassboro State College, and now Rowan University.  Due to interest in the project, the number of interviewees continues to grow.  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 and Project 100+ entries on the Web:  https://chss.rowan.edu/departments/history/alumni_highlights/project_100/