This week’s Project 100+ memory comes from Michael Ward.  He was born and raised in Egg Harbor Township, New Jersey.  His father is a professional musician who plays trumpet.  Most of his early performances were in Atlantic City, but he later performed regularly at the Walnut Street Theater in Philadelphia.  In addition, he has toured all over the world, playing with a diverse range of performers, including Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Frankie Avalon, Lady Gaga, and Lynard Skynyrd.  For most of the time while he was working as a musician, he also held a position with Sears Automotive, working there in the day and performing in the evenings.  He is retired from Sears, but Mike thinks that he will never retire from performing completely.  His mother focused on raising Mike and his sister, Jessica, before entering the workforce after Mike began middle school.  She first became a one-on-one teacher’s aide in the Egg Harbor public schools and later took an administrative assistant position at Egg Harbor Township High School.  She left the high school for an administrative position in the Egg Harbor Township Sewage Department.  She is now retired.  Mike’s older sister attended Rowan before Mike, majoring in Elementary Education.  Mike attended public schools and graduated from Egg Harbor Township High School in 2007.  After graduating in 2011 from Rowan University with majors in history and secondary education, Mike tried very hard to find a teaching position. He interviewed and missed out narrowly on a history position at an Atlantic City charter school named Oceanside.  Several months later, the principal at the school called and offered Mike the position of technology coordinator based on experience he listed on his resume from a technology position he had with the College of Education.  In 2012, when that school year ended, Mike left that position and joined a cancer registry software company in Wall Township as a technical support analyst.  Despite the fact that his job involved a long commute of 90 minutes, he remained at the company for nine years, during which time the company expanded from ten or so employees to around thirty employees.  He did everything during this time on the technical side but also did some work on the sales side.  When he left the company in 2021, his title was project manager.  Mike then took a new job only five minutes from his house.  Mike’s new position was for an international corporation based in South Korea that stores medical images for hospitals, doctor’s offices, and a variety of similar places.  The North American division is called INFINITT and is second in size only to the South Korean division.  He works with new clients on technical matters, and his current title is HL7 Analyst.

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My father went to college for one year before he dropped out to play music.  My mother never attended college.  Both of them wanted their children to be the first in their families to graduate with a college degree.  My sister chose to attend Rowan to study elementary education because it had a good reputation. When it was my time to attend college, my parents indicated that they would pay exactly the same amount that they were paying for my sister.  I would have to borrow money myself if I wanted to attend anyplace more expensive.  I didn’t want to do that, so I never really considered any colleges that were more expensive.  Rowan also appealed to me because it was relatively close to my family and friends while also not being too close.  For example, Richard Stockton cost about the same as Rowan but was too close.  I considered and visited four colleges, Rowan, The College of New Jersey (TCNJ), Rider, and Delaware.  Neither Rider nor TCNJ appealed to me after my visits, but I liked both Rowan and Delaware.  However, I was not accepted at Delaware.  In hindsight, I am glad that I didn’t go there because I would have not met all the amazing people I ended up meeting.

My decision to study history and teaching involved several influences.  First, the best job that I have ever had to this day was being a camp counselor in high school.  I loved working with kids and thought that getting paid to go to the beach was awesome.  Second, my godmother was a teacher who nurtured my interest in both teaching and history.  Third, I had some influential teachers in middle school and high school that increased my pre-existing love of history.  Fourth, history was the only subject in high school where I excelled.  These things led me to applying as a history and secondary education major at Rowan.

I remember my freshmen orientation at Rowan.  I thought and still think it was great that we had an extended orientation and stayed overnight on campus.  All of us were new and learning the campus at the same time.  I made friends with which I am still close all these years later.  I can’t remember now if I knew about CLIO, the history learning community, before the orientation.  I think I received an email from you about it, but I am not sure.  In any event, I met other history majors in CLIO during orientation.

When I moved into Mimosa Hall in the fall, I realized that almost all of the CLIO history majors were living together on the first floor.  I remember meeting Andrew Shenkman who asked us to call him “Shasta,” Ian Tyson and his roommate, Joe Ciuffo, Mary Spanarkel, Jess Oller, and many others.  One of the CLIO students who did not live in Mimosa was Charles Kuski.  We didn’t really get to be friends with Charles until your class when you broke us up into small groups for a discussion of a book, titled “1776”.  Charles’s eloquent performance in the group discussion referencing George Washington somehow led all of us Mimosa folks to instantly know that Charles needed to join our friend group. 

I remember being completely unprepared for Dr. Morschauser’s class.  I had never really had to study in high school for history exams.  I was not ready for his exams, and my eyes were opened to the ways in which college was different.  I also didn’t like writing as putting my thoughts to paper is not a strong suit of mine. This combination led me to do very poorly in that course, and I had to retake it.  However, I didn’t retake it until my senior year, by which time I was a completely different student.  Even though that class was with another quality faculty member, Jim Heinzen, I breezed through that class, showing me how much I had grown as a student.

Some of the more interesting and memorable classes I took were Zulu I and Zulu II.  I took them with Mary, and I can still remember our studying together and learning to make the click sounds.  I ended up taking a lot of courses on African history and culture with Dr. Kelly Duke Bryant.  I thought she was a wonderful instructor.  The subject was so different from what I had previously learned in high school, and I found her teaching fascinating.  I can also remember taking your History of New Jersey course, and I still think about what I learned in that class.  I remember being somewhat tortured by Senior Seminar that I took with you.  I had a very hard time reading 19^th Century diaries and letters in my quest to understand the experiences of New Jersey Civil War soldiers.  Looking back now, I appreciate the experience of going into an archive and doing this work because it showed me how to persevere through challenges.

Even though I now work in technology, the skills I learned as a history major help me to this day.  In particular, the methodological approach that I employ to address problems in my current job was first developed at Rowan.  It was in my history and education courses where I had to develop a plan to solve long-term problems.  In high school, I had been able to handle most challenges as they came up.  As I learned in Dr. Morschauser’s class, I needed to develop a different set of skills to succeed at Rowan. By the time that I graduated, I had progressed much in this direction.  Even though I ended up taking positions in fields for which I had no direct training, I found myself succeeding in every one of them because I had the ability to plan, think, and solve problems.

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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.  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://www.rowan.edu/ric-edelman-college/departments/history/alumni/