On the rooftop of Thompson Hall, Adam Schmidt ’23 emerges in a white jumpsuit, a wide-brimmed hat with a mesh face veil, and thick protective gloves. Carefully, he approaches the hive, a 5-foot-tall stack of wooden boxes located behind a greenhouse near the roof’s edge. Schmidt, a molecular and cellular biology major, isn’t interested in these bees for their honey—he wants to study their brains in an attempt to understand the progression of neurodegenerative diseases in humans.

In March, the stage lights came up in Norton Clapp Theatre on a very different kind of production. A small group of actors wearing face shields stood in front of rows of empty seats while cameras streamed the performance online. After the COVID-19 pandemic forced the cancellation of the fall main stage show, Puget Sound’s Department of Theatre Arts found creative solutions to safely mount the spring production of Machinal.

Of all the specimens in Slater Museum of Natural History in Thompson Hall—birds, bird eggs, plants, skulls, skeletons—perhaps none is as strikingly colorful as the butterfly collection. We share a few of our favorites. 

The pandemic provides multiple teaching moments for students looking at the nation’s food supply.

Matthew Boyce, Puget Sound’s new vice president for enrollment, has seen the admissions process from all sides, including time as a high school counselor with a nonprofit offering SAT prep to low-income students, and in the admissions and enrollment offices at George Mason University. We asked him about the admissions process.

He’s one of the groundskeepers responsible for keeping our trees healthy and growing—and he takes that job personally.

“My favorite tree is the one I’m working on,” Lambert says. “Each tree is an individual, so there’s a relationship you form with it as you’re pruning.”

For people of color, what happened wasn’t new—it was merely a reminder of what they have seen and experienced all their lives. To gain perspective, we asked three people to reflect on the issues the country has been grappling with. One is a Black student who has struggled to feel comfortable at Puget Sound—and who is trying to make the path easier for others who follow her. Another is an alumnus whose lifelong activism dates to the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

Puget Sound's first Taiwan Culture Night brings Chinese community together

What’s it like to start college in the middle of a pandemic? We reached out to our fellow members of the Class of 2024 to see how things are going.