Jen:

A (not-so) Brief History of Jen

Childhood

Gettysburg
Folkstone Court

Teenage Years

Clague Junior High School
Huron High School

College Years (Michigan State University)

Undergraduate
Masters Degree
Doctorate Degree

Jennifer grew up as Jenny in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She lived first on Gettysburg, where she became friends with Lara, Erika, Pammy, and Jeffrey. She attended Thurston elementary school until second grade. She was shy and quiet, and spent much of her recess time playing under the cement turtle.

Jenny's house had the coolest basement, with a playhouse the size of a room, with windows and a sink and everything, expertly crafted by her dad. Many hours were spent down there, making chocolate milk for Jeffrey out of brown chalk, or playing with stuffed animals.

Melissa arrived during these years, when Jenny was three. She doesn't really remember this, but has heard the story enough times that it almost feels like a memory. She sat out on the back porch holding the brand new Melissa and called for everyone to "Come and see my new baby."

Halfway through second grade, Jenny's parents decided to move to a larger house, several miles away, on Folkstone Court. She wasn't very happy with the idea of leaving her house, so she would attempt to sabotage the selling of house by letting her pets (hermit crabs) run free so the potential buyers would think that the house had vermin. This ploy, clever though it was, did not prevent the sale of the house, and Jenny moved to Folkstone Court.

Jenny's house on Folkstone Court was brand new, and Jenny, being the big sister (Melissa was only three), got the large front bedroom to decorate as she wanted. She had blue carpet and white wallpaper with blue roses, with a matching comforter and pillow shams. It was beautiful!

Jenny loved horses. She spent a lot of her time heading about horses, and the Breyer horses that she collected roamed across the blue pastures living out Jenny's fantastic stories. There were also mice, which living in a miniature mousehouse built by her father. The mice could talk to each other, and the horses could talk to each other, but the mice couldn't talk to the horses, nor vice versa, a fact that causes Travis much merriment when she told him. Unaccountably, the horses spoke in a british accent, though the mice spoke with a midwestern twang. Laura and Jenny spent hours enacting horse drama with their many many horses.

The move to Folkstone began Jenny's serious tomboy stage. She became friends with Matthew, and they spent days at a time playing in the mud, catching crayfish, building fires, and inventing tasty treats like Giggles, which consisted of a precise mixture of fresh grass and special smooth mud, baked on the black asphalt for at least an hour. They also protected the forest from the devastating chuckchucks by beating them with sticks.

Angela was Jenny's best friend at school, and they loved to play games outside, like "Kick the Can" and "Ghost in the Graveyard". They had many sleepovers, although Angela had to miss the sleepover at school because she got chicken pox! Jenny and Angela spent a lot of time collecting stickers, like Valley Girl (gag me with a spoon!) and Scratch and Sniff, and traded them back and forth like valuable commodities.

Unfortunately, both Angela and Laura moved away during the summer before Junior High, leaving Jenny bereft of female friends during her scary voyage into her teenage years at a new big school.

Junior High was not a particularly social time for Jenny. She was very happy, but didn't have many friends. She wasn't very outgoing, and enjoyed her own company quite a bit. She perfected the technique of reading while walking down the hall between classes. She found that if you were staring at a book, people tended to avoid walking into you. She was very fond of returning home immediately after school and taking a long hot bath with a cold milkshake (vanilla with chocholate chips) and a good book. In fact, that's still one of her favorite things to do. The library at Clague was excellent, and she knew her way around like it was her own bookshelf.

High school may have been Jenny's favorite time of life. Suddenly she came out of her shell and made friends. This could have been precipitated by the removal of the braces, the procurement of contact lenses, and a lighter hand on the curling iron. She immediately fell into the Huron Players drama club, which was an amazing group of people that became her best friends for the three years of high school, and many are still close. One of them, Julie, will be a bridesmaid in the wedding of Travis and Jen, and Jen was a bridesmaid in her wedding on September 2nd, 2000.

Jen had her first kiss from one of the Huron Players, Will (see second picture in Masters' section), a very attractive boy who even had a car! He recently reminded Jen that the reason that they didn't date for very long was that she told him that 'boys are a waste of time'. She's changed her mind, now, obviously.

Jenny was involved with many plays through her high school years. Much of the time was spent behind the scenes, building or painting sets, running lights, or setting up props. She had her moments in the spotlight, though, most memorably as a 13-year old prostitute in the gritty musical "Runaways". She wore a skirt that had fit her when she was eight, too much makeup, and curly hair curtesy of Julie's curling iron.

Julie and Jenny spent many many hours together, discussing boys and music and planning parties. A lot of parties were held at Jenny's house in the basement with lots of dancing to such classics as "Rock Lobster", "Hello, I Love You", "Time Warp", "Safety Dance", and anything by New Order or Depeche Mode.

Jenny went off to college and became "Jen", a product of the general laziness or lack of energy demonstrated by college students. She immediately became friends with Paul, Eric, and Deb, and loved her roommate Theresa, although she had gone in blindly. Many trips were made back to Ann Arbor to see Julie and Carl and the rest of the Huron Players crew.

Driven by her mom's obvious dedication to her college sorority, Jen decided to try rushing. She didn't know until the first rush meeting that she didn't really have the fashion sense to be attending the parties, but fashion was never that important to her, so she continued on. She eventually accepted a bid from Phi Mu and became a pledge. That lasted about three months. Jen wasn't very excited about spending time with a bunch of girls and their rituals and frat boys and drinking, so she quit right before activation.

Although Jen originally planned on being a veterinarian, her predisposition to passing out at the sight of blood precluded that career choice. Inspired by Huron Players such as Walter and Ken, she built on her early BASIC programming experience and became a computer science major.

Life in the masters program was excellent for Jen. Classes were interesting and fun, and she was friends with Scott, Karen, Brian, Dave, and Rob. The group (later referred to as Llamas) spent an excellent spring break in Cancun, Mexico. Weekly 90210/Melrose Place parties were the norm. Jen discovered rollerblading and went out just about every night on campus with Grady and Chris. Jen started being a teaching assistant for CPS 100: Using Computers, which is where she first really met Travis (though he claims they met the previous year). She soon filled his vacated position as Lead Teaching Assistant for the class, and began her first managerial role.

Eventually, Jen finished her Masters degree, and pondered what to do with her life, next. Travis was there during this musing, and somehow directed it toward PhD work, which he had just started. He convinced her that she should stay for a PhD, and he got her an interview for the system administration position that eventually supported most of her PhD career. Looking back, it is possible that his actions were not entirely unselfish.

Jen's life as a doctoral student were not as easy and fun as her life in the masters program. The course work wasn't too bad... she had been at MSU for so long that she had already taken most of the classes. The research was difficult for her, though. She worked in spurts; sometimes she would work for two weeks straight, barely sleeping or eating, and other times she would sit in the bathtub and read books for days on end.

Travis earned his PhD in 1998, and became Dr. Doom as he had always planned. This milestone led to another; he accepted a job as a professor at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. Jen was not done with her dissertation yet, and would not be for another two years, though she didn't know that then. After a great deal of thought, she decided to leave East Lansing to be with Travis. It was a pivotal decision.

Writing her dissertation was probably the most difficult thing Jen has done in her life. Moving away from MSU took her away from her excellent advisor (Dr. Anthony Wojcik), as well as the other PhD students that had provided support and an environment conducive to research and writing. After uncountable all-nighters (Jen works better at night) she finally finished in May, 2000. She successfully defended her dissertation and became Dr. White just in time to leave for Camp Michigania.

The dissertation required some editing before she would be officially graduated, so she sacrificed several precious days off to finish it up on her trusty IBM Thinkpad 365XD. She took a day off so she could take it down to Michigan State, but they wouldn't accept it because the font was too small or something. She had to reprint it, by which point it was too late. Luckily, her good friend Delia agreed to turn it in for her on the following Monday. Those two days were very long, but Travis had returned to Camp with her, which made it bearable.

On June 26th, 2000, Delia sent email stating that the dissertation had been accepted! Jen was finally done. It was the moment Travis had been waiting for... to read more about that, see The Proposal.