Jill Meyer ’09 is an Instructor in Biology and Cluster Dean of Pine Knoll for the 2023-2024 school year. As an Andover alum, Meyer is also Assistant Coach for Girls Water Polo. In her freetime, she enjoys hiking the mountains of New Hampshire and cooking.
I actually did not want to come to Andover at first. I had a smaller boarding school that I was dead set on and thought I was going to go to, and then my parents really wanted me to look at a variety of schools and see a big school in addition to a small school. So we came up to look at Andover and I was convinced that this was not going to be something I was interested in at all, [but] I loved it. I got here and loved the campus. I had a great interview with someone who is no longer in the admission office but we walked around campus for my interview and she sort of showed me all over the place, and I immediately was like, ‘This is it, I wanna come here.’
The things that I really loved the most were my connections with my teachers. So, I was always someone who tried to get to know my teachers in and out of the classroom. I would stick around after class to chat, I was someone who would ask how their weekend was when I got to class. A lot of my teachers back then are now my colleagues so it’s nice to kind of have that connection. So I spoke to them throughout college when I decided to be a biology major. I went back [to] Mr. [Keith] Robinson [’96] who is now one of my colleagues in the Biology department and then when I decided to come back to Andover I was talking with Mr. [Brian] Faulk [’00], who was my chemistry teacher when I was a Lower, and then [later] became one of my mentors and colleagues in the Chem[istry] department.
It was sort of an accident of timing. I was dead set on being a pediatrician, I really wanted to be a doctor, but I knew I wanted to take a gap year so I was looking at things that I could do for one year. At that time the Andover teaching fellow program was a clear one-year commitment, you couldn’t stay longer if you wanted to, so it felt like a nice sort of tidy, safe, fun option for that year, and my sister was a Senior at Andover at the time so it felt like a nice opportunity to come back and connect with her and be on campus at the same time she was here. So, I applied to be a teaching fellow in Biology and Chemistry and got hired by the Chemistry department.
My favorite moment as a coach, I am now the assistant coach, but as the head coach, I had a tough record. We did not win a lot of games and we had lost maybe eight or nine consecutive games. We drove down to Suffield [Academy], which is a really long drive, it was a Wednesday. It’s a little bit hard to gear yourself up for this big drive to a game where you’re not sure if you’re gonna win and it feels like a really big time commitment. We got there and we were playing and it was like our best game of the season. We were going back and forth in goals and we wound up winning that game in the last two minutes and that was my one win as a head coach. That was my favorite time, no matter the outcome, which was mostly losing, they were always excited to get on the bus, excited to get in the pool, excited to come to practice, and you would never guess that this is a group of kids that had only won one out of their last 20 games because they were so positive and it was just a great season despite our record.
I really wanted to be a doctor, that was kind of what I was marching towards my whole life and I was drawn to it because I love science. I love thinking about how things work, why things work, what happens when things don’t work the way that they are supposed to. That really fits well with biology. There’s so much information that you have to figure out what do I need to pay attention to, what are the pieces that are important here, and how does that interact with the bigger system. I feel like in bio[logy] you can always zoom in further or zoom out, and just depending on your level of interest in either biochemistry or on a more macro scale like evolution and ecology there’s something for everyone in bio[logy].
I really admired my Cluster Deans as a student. They seemed very level-headed, they were able to really foster a lot of community spirit. I love the cluster system because it seems like one of the only things at Andover that’s just for community building and fun. [The cluster system] seems like a nice way to intentionally carve out smaller communities. So, the commitment that they make to making sure that kids feel like they have a place where they feel they belong and an adult who knows them, that they are part of a larger community outside of their dorm but smaller than the whole school.
It’s a more supportive community for sure, I remember not having a great idea always of how I was doing my classes and then getting my midterm report, seeing my grades, and feeling like I was set off on my own to figure things out by the time final grades rolled around. I don’t remember having as many conversations with my advisor that I have with my advisees now about study skills or spaces to go to get extra help. It felt more like occasional check-ins versus these regular intentional conversations about how people are doing and how their classes are going and things beyond the classroom too. So I think there is more adult-student interaction and more support for students along the way, not just at midterm and end of term.
It helps me keep in mind that students are so much more than they are in the classroom. They are more than just biology students, or math students, or water polo players. A lot of them are in other sports or music groups or different clubs. It helps me keep perspective that in a perfect world everyone is zeroed in on what I care about but in reality they are big multidimensional people and the way that I intersect with them is just one tiny component of their Andover experience so I try to keep that in my mind that this is just one facet of their Andover life. Even though it is a big part of mine it might not be the most important to them.
It’s really hard and it’s okay to not have it perfect all the time. Sometimes the test is not going to get graded and the class has been really patient and forgiving with me when I say, “I will have your test done for the next period,” and it turns into the period after that. It’s okay to not be perfect or have everything balanced perfectly, I certainly don’t. There are nights when we eat mac and cheese for dinner and there are no vegetables on the table. I have two small kids so I’m balancing that too. But just recognizing you are a work in progress and it’s okay to make mistakes and for things to not be perfect on the inside or outside.
I don’t have a lot of freetime. But what I used to love to do is hiking and cooking, so there are 48 peaks in New Hampshire that are above 4,000 feet and I set out to hike all those, and I finished that in 2021 right at the start of Covid[-19]. Then I love cooking, I follow all The New York Times chefs on Instagram and I love trying to make their recipes and not judge myself too much if it doesn’t turn out like the images.
