One evening last June, philosophy professor Ariela Tubert and Hispanic studies associate professor Brendan Lanctot led their class along the narrow, labyrinthian paths of Recoleta Cemetery on the acropolis of Buenos Aires, where more than 6,400 above-ground burial sites quietly tell the story of this complicated country.

Late one evening in a Thompson Hall classroom, roughly a dozen students gathered to hear Puget Sound psychology professor Erin Colbert-White give a talk called “The Ethics of Animal Consciousness.”

Last summer, two Puget Sound faculty members received some exciting news. They’d won a National Science Foundation grant to develop new course modules that would allow students to explore and experience real data collected by Arctic and Antarctic scientists.

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.