Jonelle Rowe
Former Chief of the Division of Neonatology at the University of Connecticut, Jonelle Rowe, is a graduate of Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. Rowe talks about her experiences traveling all over the country pursuing various academic passions. She grew up in Kingston, PA, with a family of clinical professionals. She tried to choose a career different from her siblings and parents, but after pursuing a major as well as a master's degree in history, she gave into the familial pattern and ended up going to medical school. She went on to do amazing things, contributing a large period of her life to neonatology, the study of newborn babies, specifically premature or ill.
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"Do you what you want, but you can do more than you think you can."
Today, the residents are playing bingo. As someone shouts the numbers of the colorful balls, Rowe talks to me about the unexpected course of her life.
After hearing her life's story, I ask her, “Where did all of this passion for academics come from? ” She talks about her parents and how they discovered their careers. When her parents got married, her mother persuaded her father to pursue a career as a doctor and go to medical school. Rowe explains how “He was a teacher when they married” but laughs while she says “She wanted to be married a doctor.” So that is exactly what he did. Rowe’s father ended up studying abroad at a medical school in Padua, Italy. Rowe says that this experience was especially tricky for her father because not only did he have to learn medicine, but he also had to take on the challenge of learning the intricate language of Italian. That extra challenge proved to be beneficial in the long term when he returned back to Kingston, Pennsylvania. Rowe explains how a large amount of the neighborhood was Italian and the families would take their children to Rowe’s father because he was the only physician who spoke Italian in the area. She laughs to herself when she says, “He was Irish.”
“No one deserves to be lied to. It is best to always be truthful and always live your life with honesty.”
Besides her family, Rowe talks about the roles of the various teaching figures during her childhood. One figure, in particular, was her ballet teacher, Barbara Weisberger. She says, “Not only did she teach me ballet, but she taught me disability, joy, and values” Rowe’s memories of Weisberger have remained very prominent to this day, and have guided her throughout her eventful life. Her teacher, Barbara Weisberger was the founder of the Pennsylvania Ballet in 1963 and devoted her life to training world-class ballerinas.
“Now for your journey,” I ask her. Rowe was just as smart as her father and ambitious her ballet instructor. She went from being the only girl in her advanced math class at her school in Kingston to studying at Vassar College, an all-girls school at the time. There, she found her love for learning history, which she decided to major in. After she graduated, she went on to pursue her graduate degree in history at New York University, but she didn’t stop there. Despite telling herself that she was going to do something different than her family, she finally gave in and went to medical school. However, this decision to enter the medical field would be on her own terms and she says, “I’ll be damned if I was ever going to let my mother tell me what to do.”
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Fast forward a couple of years. Jonelle Rowe went all over for medical school: from Yale University to the University of Washington in St. Louis to transferring to the University of Vermont to be with her husband. Over the course of her career, Rowe went from clinical to teaching and then finally, to medical. She ended up practicing in the medicinal field of neonatology for 45 years, and during that time period, she became the Chief of the Division of Neonatology at the Unversity of Connecticut for 25 years. “This was a very interesting but emotionally difficult job,” she says. She dealt with premature babies on the daily, receiving these young infants from worried families. The results were not always positive. Since many of these babies were ill, some did not survive. Rowe and her team were responsible for telling the grim news to the parents. “This was one of the most challenging parts of my job. "How do you tell a parent that their child did not survive?” She found that what guided her in making such horrible news was honesty. Some of her coworkers often did not say that whole truth or story, but she found that families were most grateful when they were given the entire truth.
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