Summer around here has a different rhythm than the rest of the academic year. What does it feel like to you?

It’s not quite as busy on campus as it is between September and May, but it’s far from a ghost town. We have students here taking classes and doing summer research, and we have a very vital and busy conference schedule, among other activities. Conferences, summer camps, and our Summer Academic Challenge allow us to make the campus available to the broader community, where people are able to utilize our facilities in a variety of ways.

Faithlina Abeshima ’16 majored in music and psychology, but a work-study in technology set her on a different career path. Shortly after graduating, she was hired by the university as a technology support analyst; then, in 2019, she stepped into the role of information security administrator. We asked her for advice on steering clear of the hackers, scammers, and bots.  

WHAT WAS YOUR FAVORITE COURSE TO TEACH?

I’ve loved teaching the senior-level quantum mechanics course. At this stage of the game, students have enough math skills and physics background to delve deeply into the subject—it’s pretty exciting for them and for me as well. It all starts to come together. I learn more every time I teach the course.

- Greg Elliott, professor of physics, retiring after 30 years at Puget Sound

Sarah Strattan ’11 grew up in Evergreen, Colo., fascinated by the “Fourteeners”—the Colorado peaks that exceed 14,000 feet. In college, Puget Sound Outdoors introduced her to backpacking, and an outdoor leadership experience in Alaska taught her about mountaineering. She climbed Rainier, then Denali. Then she set her sights on the Himalayas. Strattan, who taught middle school science for a time and now works on the ski patrol at Aspen Highlands Ski Area, spends part of each summer challenging herself on Asia’s tallest peaks.

Ronald R. Thomas is home. For 13 years, from the summers of 2003 through 2016, that beloved home was here, as president of University of Puget Sound. His irrepressible enthusiasm for all things Puget Sound so animates the campus today that it’s impossible to speak of it in the past tense. He loved it all: every student, every possibility, every building, every blade of grass. The campus looks the way it does because he was a master of master planning.

Puget Sound’s Archives & Special Collections recently acquired 150 pop-up books, donated by retired art librarian Stanley Hess of Bremerton, Wash. Pop-up books, which date to the 13th century, are intricate—their authors are often referred to as “paper engineers”—and highly interactive. The books are popular not just with kids but also art lovers and book collectors.

Matt Loewen ’08 studies the rocks he finds in some of the most remote corners of Alaska to help him understand volcanoes.

Growing up, there weren’t many sports Erin Peterson ’00, DPT’03 didn’t try. “If it was a sport, I played it,” says Peterson, who played varsity softball and basketball at Puget Sound while she studied natural science. It was softball that earned her a spot in the Puget Sound Athletic Hall of Fame in 2013, thanks in part to school records she set, some of which still stand. Softball was always her first love: When she discovered it at the age of 6, she says, it “felt like coming home.”

As a kumu hula, or master teacher of hula, Michael Pili Pang ’84 firmly believes in the concept of huliau: to look back in order to move forward. “Hula is an indigenous art form, but it is not something that is to be kept on a shelf,” he says. “It evolves.”

Madyson Willoughby ’19 hadn’t planned to become an entrepreneur right out of college, but she was perfectly positioned for it to happen.

The Tacoma native majored in business at Puget Sound, and after graduation was waiting tables and selling her vintage clothing collection on the app Depop when she stumbled across an opportunity to lease a pint-sized storefront on 6th Avenue. Several months later, Willoughby opened Good Vibes Vintage & Resale, a pastel-pink treasure trove of pre-loved clothing.