News & Events

Monk retires after 37 years of service

Assistant Professor of Kinesiology Susan Monk will officially retire on June 30, 2010, after 37 years of service to Penn State Berks. Monk earned her undergraduate, master's, and Ph.D. degrees from Penn State before coming to Berks to teach.

"My entire education was completed at such a big University, I had always assumed I would end up teaching at a big school, but when I got to Berks and found the small setting to offer such a great sense of community, I didn't want to leave," she says.

Monk's 37 years at Berks allowed her to see momentous change at the campus. She recalls the challenges of teaching Kinesiology before the campus even had a gymnasium.

"We had to do a lot of activities and teaching outside." She added that she would even use a hallway of the Perkins Student Center as an area to teach fencing.

Monk was part of the effort to bring the campus' first women's sport, field hockey, to Berks. She also coached the women's field hockey team.

Over the course of her career at Berks, Monk began teaching Physiology and Anatomy courses at the campus and retired as a "classroom only" teacher in those subjects.