Many students will remember Nov. 7, 2009 as another day of homecoming festivities. Their nights may have been full of tailgating, cheering on the Toppers and attending after parties.

But Elizabethtown senior Jennifer Nethers Gruber will remember the date for another special reason.

She wed her longtime boyfriend, Western alumnus Chris Gruber, from Louisville. The couple married in Louisville.

Nethers Gruber, a community adviser in Pearce-Ford Tower, spent her semesters being more than a student. She juggled classes, office hours, being there for her residents and planning her wedding. Many nights, she sat at the PFT desk during some of her shifts arranging agendas and keepsakes.

“It would get hard trying to balance my homework against making the party favors,” Nethers Gruber said.

She said she did many of the tasks alone so she could monitor how everything was being done. Nethers Gruber made small white boxes that held mints but didn’t want a lot of people’s hands on the mints, she said.

The couple put goldfish on some of the tables as larger keepsakes, so when the guests went home, they would have one thing that wouldn’t be constrained to a photo album.

Nethers Gruber said she knew her co-workers were supportive, so she brought some of the keepsakes back to them and her other friends at Western who couldn’t attend the wedding.

“I grabbed one because I want to put it in the scrapbook along with all of my other wedding things,” said Bennett Hibbler, a senior from Gallatin, Tenn. “Plus, it had candy in it.”

Though Nethers Gruber poured her energy into making her big day perfect, she said it’s difficult to be away from her husband, who is a graduate student at the University of Louisville.

She will graduate in December and also attend U of L in the spring as a graduate student. Then, the newlyweds will finally be able to live together.

“It really doesn’t feel like we’re married because this is the same thing that we’ve been doing all semester,” Nethers Gruber said.

Since the wedding was on homecoming weekend, her co-workers said they couldn’t attend, but they wished her well before she left for Louisville on Thursday.

“I know you were a beautiful bride,” Charqwan Palton, a senior from Memphis, Tenn., said to her. “I hope you had the wedding of your dreams.”

Many couples enjoy a honeymoon or at least time together during their first nights as man and wife. But Nethers Gruber didn’t put her work and school on pause.

She jumped right back into the normal college student’s life Sunday with a new last name and nine months of planning for the beginning of a new life behind her.