The 32nd Annual Alumni Sharing Knowledge Night, known to most Loggers as “ASK Night,” was in full swing. The event welcomed alumni back to campus to connect with current students and chat about possible career paths, internships, classes, grad schools, volunteering opportunities, and virtually every other experience that can help shape both a student’s college career and their professional one.

She’d led a parade of local children with red paper lanterns to a small bridge overlooking the Sound to close out the Tacoma Moon Festival, an annual event presented by the Chinese Reconciliation Project Foundation and about two dozen community partners to mark the end of summer, usher in fall, and celebrate diversity in Tacoma.

For many of us, physics has a tantalizing, but a kind of scary math-intensive caché about it. For Andy Rex—a fixture in the physics department for more than 35 years—it’s just baseball.

Lizz and several other students from the University of Puget Sound had left Seattle at 2 a.m., and arrived two days later. “There was just this moment of elation, of everything materializing and becoming real that we were actually there, but also feeling very unreal,” she says.

“Please come in,” the women said. “Welcome. You’re safe now. We’ve been waiting for you.” They guided the way with flashlights and handed out Dixie cups of cool spiced tea.

The 17 students, variously clad in busted-knee jeans, leggings, hiking boots, puffer jackets, and a lone plaid flannel shirt, were pretty quiet for the first 25 minutes as two Washington Supreme Court justices talked about their work to the class Thinking Ethically: What Is Justice? Then it was question time. A hand popped up.