Roger Allen has been a professor, a sailor, a celestial navigator, a physical therapist, and a professor again. The latest leg of Allen’s unconventional career path has lasted nearly three decades, a different sort of adventure than life at sea, but no less intrepid. Or, as Professor George Tomlin said in his introduction to Allen’s Regester Lecture in 2016: “Dr. Roger J. Allen, professor of physical therapy, is not the kind of person you’d think of as coming from Kansas—but he does. Or did … just like Amelia Earhart … first female to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean.

Every year, Puget Sound students turn their academic interests into summer internships, learning the sorts of things that come from hands-on experience: the pace of the corporate world, the responsibility of community engagement, the fulfillment of working for a nonprofit. It’s one of several forms of experiential learning that Puget Sound offers. Here, we look at how eight Loggers spent last summer.

Atop a mountain thousands of miles from home, Gretchen Kunigk Fraser ’41 eased into the starting gate, set into a crouch, and awaited the signal to start the biggest ski race of her life. The odds against Fraser were already tremendously long. The fact that she had even made it to this point—competing in the 1948 Olympic slalom event in St. Moritz, Switzerland, and clinging to a narrow one-tenth of a second lead as she began her second and final run in the competition—felt like something of a miracle.

It’s a cold, clear night in the pitch-black dome of the observatory at University of Puget Sound. In the dark, Austin Glock ’23 makes minute adjustments to the telescope by the light of a headlamp. He’s focusing on Arcturus, a bright orange star located 37 lightyears away. He’s using Arcturus to calibrate the telescope in order to observe something that few people have ever seen—a planet orbiting another star in our galaxy.

Assistant Professor Tina Huynh wants to share the joy of music with everyone. Whether she’s collecting Vietnamese children’s music, teaching undergraduate- and graduate-level courses in music and music education at the university, or serving as the Tacoma Refugee Choir’s project scholar, Huynh is passionate about preserving music and passing it on. Here, she talks about her creative and scholarly projects, her favorite instruments, and a documentary she’s created.

In 2019, as the federal government began preparations for the 2020 U.S. Census, Associate Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science Courtney Thatcher was doing a lot of thinking about the problem of redistricting.

Logger student-athletes will benefit on and off the field from a historic gift to the university. The Tom and Meg Names Family Foundation has committed $10 million—the largest single gift in the university’s 134-year history—to the Puget Sound endowment. The gift will add to the existing Tom and Meg Names Family Foundation Endowed Fund for Athletics and create a new fund to support the health, wellness, and development— both personal and professional—of Logger student-athletes.

President Isiaah Crawford calls the gift “transformational.”

The Lunar New Year arrives on Jan. 22, when communities around the world begin to celebrate for 15 days. We asked Lo Sun “Lotus” Perry, who has taught Chinese language and culture at Puget Sound since 1986, to explain the centuries-old festival—a time to rest, gather with family, eat delicious food, and be filled with optimism about the year ahead.