On a recent late-winter evening at the North Tacoma home of Jill Nelson Jackson ’84 and Martin Jackson ’84, a tradition was being revived.
The Creatures of Commencement Bay
“Do they bite?” It is an obvious question for one small, ponytailed visitor standing almost nose-to-beak with a common murre splayed on the dissecting table. The Puget Sound student scientist at work doesn’t answer as she carefully takes a scalpel to the dead bird’s white belly, amid an “ooooohh” from the gaggle of children. “Did he fly?” the same girl persists, with more curiosity than consternation.
Making It in the Makerspace
Yup. No fear is exactly what a student needs to turn some wild idea they dreamed up over coffee into a real “thing”—a thing you can touch, see, and use.
Welcome to the Makerspace: a place, Cambridge Dictionary tells us, “where people can come together to create or invent things, either using traditional crafts or technology.” Puget Sound launched its new Makerspace this fall and held an open house for campus members.
Summer School
Last spring, 80 students were selected to receive summer research grants to support 10 weeks of independent research in the sciences or humanities under the guidance of a faculty advisor. Projects covered a wide range of topics, such as wastewater opioid analysis, the influence of hip flexibility on running gait, LGBTQ and person of color representation in young adult fiction, environmental racism, and more, including:
Why Stories Matter
“Stories matter. Stories are a reflection of power.” When Alicia Garza, a founder of the Black Lives Matter movement, said this during her keynote address at the close of the 2018 Race & Pedagogy National Conference held on campus last September, it struck me that this was the crux of the conference. Its title,“Radically Re-Imagining the Project of Justice: Narratives of Rupture, Resilience, and Liberation,” was a call for participants to share their stories and to speak into the spaces that have rendered them invisible.