It didn’t quite work out how I planned: At the end of the week, I found out I hadn’t matched with my preferred houses. But I muddled through the rest of the semester and started to find my footing. Despite some lingering disappointment, I tried again during fall rush my sophomore year.
The smell of hazelnut filling my nose as I clutched my morning latte on the way to class. The din of lacrosse practice sneaking through the glass of my Phibbs Hall dorm window. The feeling of damp wool socks sliding around inside my Birkenstocks. The calming, omnipresent sight of ivy blanketing the campus as if it were protecting us from the outside world. Puget Sound was a beautiful bubble from the harsh realities that lay ahead. It was, in the truest sense, how it felt to be safe.
I was thrilled to get a job there as a sophomore, first as a French tutor and then — by my junior year — as a writing advisor. I could not have anticipated how holistically the CWL would change my life. In our first semester as employees, tutors were required to take an additional course that taught us about potential internal biases, ways of learning, and methods or meeting people where they are in their academic journeys so that we could best serve as many students as possible.
KUPS, Puget Sound’s nationally recognized campus radio station, has always had a countercultural streak, playing music well outside the Top 40 and giving airtime to voices you don’t typically hear on commercial radio. So, it may come as no surprise that the station itself arose from a prank. In the spring of 1966, first-year Rockwell Smith ’69 and a few co-conspirators hijacked the carillon system — normally used to broadcast the sound of bells — to play seven-and-a-half minutes of sound effects, including a cacophony of train whistles and car horns.
