Left to right is Megan, John, and Melanie Marbach today.
What do parents do when they’ve got triplets graduating from three different universities in three different states on the same weekend?
That’s about to happen for John Marbach and Sherry Pressler of Belle Mead, NJ, and making it all work will take trains, planes, and automobiles. Their triplets—Melanie, Megan and John Jr.—will graduate respectively from Loyola University Maryland in Baltimore, MD, on May 16; Fairfield University in Fairfield, CT on May 17; and Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, NC on May 18.
Each sibling is commited to being at each other’s ceremonies as well.
“The whole family feels incredibly lucky that the ceremonies fall on different days,” said Megan Marbach, a senior at Fairfield University’s School of Nursing. “Melanie and John are my best friends for life, so I wouldn’t miss their graduations for anything.”
In fact, the family has been planning this weekend’s events since 2010. Parents Sherry and John were concerned that their children would graduate on the same day so they checked all the graduation calendars as soon as their children enrolled.
The weekend has already begun with John and Sherry departing New Jersey for Baltimore, where Melanie—the youngest of the three by six minutes—will graduate from Loyola with a degree in accounting. Megan and John Jr. will join them and on Friday evening, the family will celebrate Melanie’s graduation as well as the triplets’ 22nd birthday.
After the Loyola graduation Saturday morning, the will make their way to Connecticut to Fairfield University, a Jesuit institution an hour from Manhattan. After commencement for Megan on Sunday morning, they’ll have a celebration luncheon hosted at the beach and then drive to JFK International Airport for a flight to Winston-Salem, where they will make their way to Wake Forest and John Jr.’s graduation with a computer science degree on Monday morning.
John said the years have flown by since the triplets were born. “We have some elementary school pictures on a kitchen wall. The pictures seem like [they were taken] yesterday.”
As for what’s next for the triplets: Megan and Melanie plan to live and work in New York City where Megan hopes to practice as an orthopedic nurse. John Jr. is headed to Silicon Valley to work for a start-up called Tsumobi.
This story was taken from a news release from Fairfield University, a Jesuit University, with more than 5,000 undergraduate and graduate students.
And today we celebrate...