Sarah Rafferty Garcia ’02, M’25, a history educator and lifelong learner, became a Gettysburg student for a second time, more than two decades later, as a master’s student in the Gettysburg College Gilder-Lehrman Institute (GLI) M.A. program.
When Sarah Rafferty Garcia ’02, M’25 was a high school senior, she visited Gettysburg College and immediately fell in love with the tight-knit campus. She decided to attend Gettysburg as a history major with an education minor and never looked back.
“I loved the campus. I loved the class sizes. I loved the dorms. It just felt like home when I was there,” she said.
More than two decades later, Garcia will receive her diploma from Gettysburg for a second time at the Master’s Commencement Ceremony on July 17, as a graduate from the Gettysburg College Gilder-Lehrman Institute (GLI) M.A. program. Today, Garcia teaches 6th grade geography and 9th grade world history at the Academy of Notre Dame de Namur in Villanova, Pennsylvania, not far from where she grew up and first discovered her love for history.
“Growing up in the Philadelphia suburbs, we’re surrounded by history, and it’s something that was always really interesting to me as a child,” Garcia said. “That rubbed off on me and made me have this natural curiosity about what things have happened around me.”
When she learned of the master’s program and weighed factors like its affordability, affiliation with a school she already proudly attended and loves, and the chance to continue learning, the opportunity felt like a “no-brainer” to her.
“I love learning, and I love asking why and finding out the why … behind things in my everyday life,” she said. “This has been an amazing way to get back into the swing of not just the academic piece of my professional life, but that questioning and observing of things around me.”
Garcia delighted in the opportunity to expand her history knowledge from subject matter experts. She relished in courses like The Vietnam War with Harvard University’s Prof. Fredrik Logevall and Immigrants and Immigration in the Age of Lincoln with Prof. Harold Holzer of Hunter College.
“We would ask the professor, ‘What do you think is the most important thing I need to leave my students with for this finite amount of time that I have to teach this topic?’” she said. “The section professors gave us this professional respect as regular master’s degree students, even though we’re not in a traditional brick-and-mortar setting.”
Despite the fact that the program was fully online, Garcia found it easy to access robust resources and network with her cohort. She leveraged the GLI archives, met with Musselman Library’s research librarians, and got permission to access the Villanova University library, not far from where she lives. She also swapped teaching resources and ideas of sites to visit with museum workers, National Park Service employees, and fellow educators from across the country.
“Teachers are usually confined to just our school, so to be able to connect with teachers all over the country and learn from professors from all different walks of life was really valuable,” Garcia said.
The master’s program felt particularly full circle for Garcia when she had the opportunity to take class or moderate Q&A sessions with Gettysburg’s own History Chair and Edwin T. Johnson & Cynthia Shearer Johnson Distinguished Teaching Chair in the Humanities Professor Timothy J. Shannon and History Prof. Michael J. Birkner ’72, P’10.
“Prof. Birkner was my advisor for the undergrad major thesis project. He gave us the freedom to pick a topic within World War II that really interested us. He supported me; he challenged me; he helped me find sources,” she said. “Then that whole cycle repeated itself in the master's program.”
Returning to the role of student also reinvigorated Garcia’s compassionate and out-of-the-box approach to teaching. She’s begun making rubrics clearer and encouraging her students to pursue niche topics of interest within a broader assignment.
“I feel this sense of empowerment in not just the knowledge that I have, but this ability to look at history with a lot more of an intersectional lens,” she said. “The courses taught me to look at things from different angles, to consider different sides of stories, to go to different places to find resources and different ways to go about research.”
Garcia not only felt empowered by her command of historical knowledge and perseverance throughout the master’s program, but she also felt energized returning to an environment steeped in academic curiosity and continuous learning—values she hopes to impress upon her students and two teenage children.
“To see that this kind of academic curiosity is alive and well, and it’s something that Gettysburg is nurturing, is really exciting to have been a part of and continue to be a part of,” she said. “I think it's really valuable—this idea that learning is a lifelong endeavor. That’s something I really want to model to the students.”
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By Phoebe Doscher ’22
Photos courtesy of Sarah Rafferty Garcia ’02, M’25 and used with permission from the Academy of Notre Dame
Posted: 07/03/25