Alumni Profiles

Being All She Can Be An Iraq veteran ends up on the cover of a national bridal magazine By Lindsay Stuart Hill

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Megan Robillard '05 may be a wedding magazine cover girl, but she's no Barbie doll, says Modern Bride editor Antonia van der Meer. "We think of Megan as an action figure," she told CBS News. Robillard returned from a 15-month deployment in Iraq last December. Seven months later, she was crowned Modern Bride of the Year in New York City.

Robillard insists that her double identity as U.S. Army captain and bride magazine cover model doesn't make her unusual. Someone can put on a uniform and "assume the role of the soldier, but still have another side," she says. Or many sides, in Robillard's case. She majored in biochemistry at UNH, worked as an Army chemical officer prior to her deployment, and is planning to pursue a career in pharmacy.

"The modern bride these days is not just the bride," Robillard told Fox News. "She's also a woman who is balancing all these other things in her life, and she's found that guy who just matches her." When she heard about the Modern Bride cover contest, Robillard says, she liked that the magazine was looking to photograph "real people." Her fiance, Ryan Bell, encouraged her to enter.

After a week of shopping and sightseeing in New York City with the other four finalists, Robillard was announced the winner on "The Early Show" on CBS. Compared to the 15-hour days she worked in Iraq, the following 9-hour-long photo shoot could hardly be called grueling. But Robillard was still impressed. "I saw how much work goes into one photo," she says.

Van der Meer told CBS that Modern Bride chose Robillard because "she is giving back to her community and to her country." When her military service ends, Robillard will get married—a July wedding is planned—and begin pharmacy school in Manchester, N.H. When she was younger, she wanted to pursue medical research after her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. But she enjoyed working with pharmaceuticals in an endocrinology class at UNH, and her plans changed. "I knew I was meant to be working with people," she says. "I want to make an impact on their lives, and see that impact."