Before Oakland University was known for being the Golden Grizzlies, OU was originally home to the Pioneers. While some people can say they left college as a Pioneer, and others can say they left as a Golden Grizzly, not many can say they were both.
Jean Ann Miller is the senior director of Student Involvement at OU but started her journey as a student herself. While she started her role as a staff member in 1983 with the residence halls, She has been a bright member of OU’s community since 1973, when she started her freshman year, originally as a commuter.
“I first was a commuter, and then I moved in the residence halls and lived in the residence halls the rest of my time that I went as an undergraduate at OU,” Miller said. “I lived in the smaller residence halls when Pryale and Fitzgerald were still residence halls.”
While students today see the OU RecWell as a stand-out for the university, back in Miller’s college years, it largely fell off her radar.
“They didn’t have that kind of equipment and the current kind of facility as they do now,” Miller said. “The big thing on our radar was the Meadow Brook Amphitheatre because we had some phenomenal concerts back then. They used to offer us what were called Grass Passes, which were five concerts for five bucks.”
Miller has been a part of what we now know as the Office for Student Involvement (OSI) for several years, but the OSI wasn’t always the OSI.
“When I came back [to working for OU], it was the Center for Student Activity and Leadership Development, or CSA,” Miller said. “Then we changed to OSI, but even when I went to school here, it was either just Student Activities or Campus Information Programs and Organizations, so we went from CIPO to CSA to OSI.”
Although the Golden Grizzly branding eventually stuck for OU, many of the Pioneers had a hard time switching over. While Miller is in the same boat, she can also see why the Golden Grizzly name has cemented itself in OU’s branding.
“I will say that it was a difficult transition because of being a Pioneer, but I think being a Golden Grizzly, there’s more connection,” Miller said. “You can relate to it better than pioneers because we really didn’t have a focus. We got the Grizz, but we really didn’t have Pioneer Pete.”
As Miller reminisces about her time with OU from past to present, she credits her influence for helping the students of OU to her experience as an OU student and the faculty she met along the way.
“I didn’t really know what my career path was going to be, and my experiences definitely impacted my direction in my career,” Miller said. ‘My focus in social work was not just school, but it was college and university level. I knew this was the population that I wanted to work with.”
