She chose her major out of admiration for her parents …
“My parents are both in business. They’re chiropractors, but they own their practice. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve had a lot of proud-daughter moments watching them reach milestones in their career. Getting to see them do what they love and make what they want out of their business has been a really cool experience, and I’m very proud of them and how far they’ve come. Studying business is versatile enough that I feel well equipped to enter any field. I have a stronger understanding of personal finance and finance at large and an understanding of how things operate within any industry.”
… and she chose Muhlenberg because of its vibrant arts culture.
“I grew up dancing; I started when I was eight years old. One of my ballet teachers, Jessica Afflerbach ’19, was a Muhlenberg alum. I was like, ‘Maybe I should take a look.’ I knew I wanted to be a business major, but I also wanted to be able to dance. Most schools looked at me like I had two heads. They were like, ‘You kind of have to pick one.’ But at Muhlenberg, I said, ‘I would like to do both,’ and they said, ‘OK.’ There are so many opportunities to dance here: You can take classes, be on recreational teams, participate in performances. I enjoyed that I could come to Muhlenberg and get my business education but also a dance education as part of it.”
She’s working on an honors thesis inspired by her family’s business.
“My thesis uses census data to map every chiropractor in the United States. So I have these wonderful interactive maps that tell you how many chiropractors there are in a given state and the median income, the household poverty rates, and the unemployment rates for each county. I could see that there were chiropractic deserts in the United States, so the question became what causes them. I was like, ‘What could be an even narrower niche from here?’ And it was marketing. I’d taken a marketing class in the Department [of Accounting, Business, Economics, and Finance] and I really loved it. I’m doing a website analysis and talking to [chiropractors] about the mentality behind their websites and their marketing practices.”
A professor nominated her to be a tutor, and she developed a passion for it.
“Freshman year, I was nominated to be a tutor by my Macroeconomics professor. I was like, ‘I understand a lot of the concepts I’ve learned so far really well, and I would love to teach this to other people.’ With our tutoring program, once you’re nominated for one class, you’re free to tutor for any class you’ve gotten a B or higher in, so I tutored in Spanish for a while. I took [Assistant Professor of Business Greg] Collins’ Operations and Information Systems course. It was a really challenging class, but I wound up doing really well in it. His workshop tutor was graduating, so he asked, ‘Would you be interested in taking over the workshop?’ Because the concepts in the class were hard, I was excited to have a way to keep them fresh in my own mind. It was a really rewarding process for me to develop a framework that would help other people feel comfortable with the material. From a peer-to-peer standpoint, knowing that whoever is teaching you has been in your shoes very, very recently is a different kind of connection.”
“Because the concepts in the class were hard, I was excited to have a way to keep them fresh in my own mind. It was a really rewarding process for me to develop a framework that would help other people feel comfortable with the material.”
She was also elected to a leadership position with one of Muhlenberg’s dance teams.
“I’ve had the opportunity to co-captain our commercial jazz team on campus, The Perkulators, with Jordan Lavalle ’25. We have practice twice a week, and we perform at different college events, like Family Weekend and Muhlenberg’s 175th anniversary celebration, and at halftime at the sports games. Football, basketball, men’s and women’s lacrosse — we’re all over the place. I started with that team freshman year, and I wasn’t sure if I was going to do it. There were so many things to try, and I wanted to do all of them. When they called to say I made the team, they were very encouraging and supportive, so I joined. It’s exactly the kind of community that I needed coming into college, and I have a wonderful opportunity to foster that for other people now.”
Founder and owner of Dogwood Entertainment, Ally Marman Mueller ’05, a political science major, produces custom props for film, television, and live events.
These student-athletes used their extra year of eligibility to compete for their teams while pursuing master’s degrees from the School of Graduate Studies.
