Two very different strangers came up to speak to Scott Higashi '91. He was taking part in two separate events to honor Puget Sound's 36 Japanese American students who were sent to internment camps in 1942, following the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
In 1989, he and fellow students were planting cherry trees in front of the Student Union Building—a ceremony of remembrance and regret that replaced the trees first planted in 1940 as a gift from the Japanese Student Club—when a woman approached.
Sam Faustine ’13 likes to say he has four feet. A freelance musician based in San Francisco, he uses the metaphor to explain how he juggles his varied interests as a musician. “I have one foot in the choral community, one in sacred music, one in musical theater, and one in the San Francisco Symphony and San Francisco Opera,” he says.
This summer, in the lab and in the greenhouse on the roof of Thompson Hall, Maya Sealander ’20 studied the genes of tomato plants to find out what makes some lazier than others. As one of more than 80 Puget Sound students completing summer research projects in the sciences and humanities this year, she is getting her first real research experience in the field.
He could feel the taught fabric swaying under his toes, threatening to knock him off balance. More than 100 feet below, onlookers watched, rapt, as he stopped walking, lifted one foot off of the webbing and held it out to the side, before placing it back on the length of fabric and continuing across the expanse.
Balanced precariously in his orange kayak on the lip of a 70-foot waterfall, Jonathan Blum ’06 was feeling confident. Three of his friends had safely made it down to the pool below. But as he accelerated down the Chilean torrent and landed in the white water, his head and wrist smacked the kayak’s hard plastic deck. When he surfaced, blood was streaming from his nose and his left wrist wasn’t working. Both were broken.
Below deck, the powerful propellors of the 78-foot-long Charles N. Curtis, a former U.S. Coast Guard patrol boat, churned through the Puget Sound. The students were from Tacoma Public Schools’ Science and Math Institute (SAMi), and on that particular day, the Charles served as a classroom for Matt’s marine biology class.
