Jeannette Memmer admits that she wasn’t quite sure what a student marshal was or what it entailed when she received an email from the University of Missouri–St. Louis about the honor. A quick conversation with her parents set her straight, though.
“They’re like, ‘Jeannette, accept. Accept that right now,’” she said with a laugh.
Memmer – having taken her parents’ advice – will serve as a student marshal for the College of Arts and Sciences commencement ceremony on Saturday.
The honor was well earned. Memmer will graduate summa cum laude, a semester early, from the College of Arts and Sciences and the Pierre Laclede Honors College with bachelor’s degrees in history and French.
During her time at UMSL, Memmer was thoroughly involved on campus, serving as a French tutor, intern with the Department of History and president of Phi Alpha Theta. She also earned several scholarships, including the Chancellors Scholarship, Honors College Scholarship and Marcus Allen Scholarship, and completed an internship with a historic house museum. After graduation, she plans to continue her education in a history PhD program and eventually enter the museum industry.
An early interest
Memmer developed a keen interest in history traveling the country with her family. Her parents enjoyed “learning for the sake of learning” and took Memmer and her older brother to cultural centers and historic destinations throughout the country, such as in Boston and New York.
But it was a trip to Washington, D.C. that made an especially profound impact.
“That was the first time that we had taken a trip like that – I was maybe 9 or 10,” Memmer said. “We got to go to these historic places that I just learned about in textbooks. We got to see Mount Vernon. We got to see the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. We go to go to the Smithsonian Museum and a whole bunch of different natural history museums.
“That was about the time where my parents started to clock that I was really into this. So, they started to go out of their way to make sure that I would have some exposure to the things that I was interested in.”
She credits them with putting her onto her current path.
“They just enjoy the simple act of learning more than anybody else that I know,” Memmer said. “That was something that was instilled pretty early on, and I knew that I would be able to learn for a living by getting a degree in history and by working at these types of museums that I grew up going to.”
Despite an innate curiosity in history, Memmer began to waffle on studying it as high school graduation approached. She worried about her career prospects and decided to explore the possibility of becoming a veterinarian, shadowing one for six weeks. However, a less than sterling performance in AP biology forced her to reconsider that option.
“After having taken that class, I knew that I just needed to commit to doing the thing that I really wanted to do,” she said.
After investigating the scholarship opportunities available to her, Memmer realized attending UMSL would be more affordable than attending Illinois State University – the college down the road from her high school. A visit to the UMSL campus clinched her decision.
Dual paths
Memmer enrolled as a history major and also joined the Honors College, which was appealing due to its seminar-style classes and the fishbowl discussion method used by many of the professors.
Initially, she had no intention of adding a second major. However, Associate Teaching Professor Violaine White approached her and explained that she had brought in a semester’s worth of French credits from high school.
“Dr. White told me that I would be able to tack on a major without really changing anything in my course load,” Memmer recalled. “I would just have to take maybe one or two French classes a semester until I’m done, and I would graduate with a double major. The benefits of having a degree in the language outweighed any cost, so I just decided to do it.”
Memmer also became more involved with the Department of Language and Cultural Studies, serving as a French tutor for several semesters and traveling to France as part of the three-week Strasbourg Study Tour. Along the way, mentors White and Teaching Professor Sandra Trapani helped Memmer come into her own.
White remembers being instantly impressed with her drive to succeed.
“Jeannette is an exceptional student, a high achiever, an engaged and engaging participant in discussions and an active, compassionate and mature member of the community, willing to serve her fellow students as a tutor, a mentor or a friend,” White said. “Jeannette is still the person I met three and a half years ago – she hasn’t lost her passion, her kind demeanor or her energy. By following her interests, she found her path and unfailingly did everything there was to do to progress toward her goals. I trust that’s what she will do for the rest of her life.”
Trapani also recalls Memmer standing out in her early French courses and said that she has taken full advantage of every opportunity that came her way.
“Within a short time, she found her way on campus and will leave it an even better place than when she arrived,” Trapani said.
Memmer is grateful for their guidance, which has been indispensable to her academic and professional development.
“They’ve been really supportive of me and my career decisions but also just really helpful, getting me involved in the places that I want to be involved in,” she said. “Madame White and Madame Trapani really helped me get an internship over the summer, at the Center for French Colonial Life. I had been looking for an internship like that for years.”
In addition to her involvement with the Department of Language and Cultural Studies, Memmer also became more active in the Department of History as she approached graduation. The past two semesters, Memmer has worked as a departmental intern. In that role, she managed the department’s social media, organized campus events, supported professors and worked to strengthen the presence of Phi Alpha Theta, the university’s history honors society, on campus.
The latter was the most rewarding project for Memmer, who has served as president of Phi Alpha Theta for a year and a half. She credits Professor Laura Westhoff, chair of the department, with helping her expand the organization.
“She’s been super supportive of me as a student and also as an intern, and she tolerates me just sitting in her office and talking through my plans for my future,” Memmer said. “Even if she doesn’t have any specific advice to give, just the simple act of sitting and listening to me, that in itself was helpful.”
Assistant Teaching Professor Rob Wilson has also been instrumental in preparing Memmer for graduation. Wilson, an Honors College faculty member, has helped her put together a resume, select writing samples and hone personal statements for graduate school applications.
This summer, she took her first step toward the future as an intern with the Center for French Colonial Life and the Bolduc House Museum in Ste. Genevieve, Missouri, which preserves and promotes French and Creole culture and history of the Mississippi Valley during the French colonial period in America.
A future in history
For eight weeks during the summer, Memmer drove an hour and a half to Ste. Genevieve on Thursday morning, worked eight hours, spent the night at one of the museum’s properties and then worked eight hours the next day.
She led guided tours of the museum’s properties, answered guests’ questions, gave demonstrations of a select group of artifacts and also translated some texts from the museum’s library.
However, Memmer was frustrated at first. She felt she could be doing more, particularly when foot traffic was slow. After a conversation with White, she spoke up, leading to additional research responsibilities for an upcoming exhibit on waterway travel in upper Louisiana.
“The biggest lesson that I learned was that if I wanted to have a certain experience, then I needed to advocate for myself, for that experience,” Memmer said. “I was the only one who was in charge of the trajectory of my education. It wasn’t anybody else’s responsibility.”
That trajectory is now headed toward graduate school. Memmer has applied to several PhD programs in early modern European history at prestigious institutions such as Boston University, Northwestern University, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Virginia. Ultimately, she aims to become a museum curator – the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York being a dream appointment.
No matter where Memmer ends up, she’s ready to continue leading the life she once dreamed about.
“This has been a chapter of my life that I have been thinking about and fantasizing about since I was 12,” Memmer said. “I would sit in my bedroom and have my books around me, thinking about what my life would look like in the future and who I wanted to be. It always ended with me going into grad school and working in a museum, wearing the cardigans, being the history nerd and interacting with the subjects and the things that I loved.
“Being in that moment right now, ending my undergraduate career and being able to start that new chapter in my life is surreal because I still feel like that 12-year-old sitting in my bedroom, dreaming about the future. But I’m ready. I feel ready. I feel like this is something that I have been ready for for a long time.”
