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.

Sarah Carlson ’02 shares how an internship led to a career in intelligence and counterterrorism.

English and IPE double major Kevin Nguyen ’09 accidentally writes a novel

Johnson ’96, MAT’97 teaches at the Grant Center for the Expressive Arts, part of Tacoma Public Schools, and emphasizes “geo-literacy” in his classroom; he uses Google Earth, for example, to help students understand concepts like the Earth’s movement around the sun. “Students can see a satellite image of the Eiffel Tower and tell me when it was taken based on the length and direction of the shadow,” says Johnson. In 2017, he was named a National Geographic Grosvenor Teacher Fellow—along with Kacy Lebby ’11 in Seattle—and made a 10-day expedition to the Galapagos.

Under ordinary circumstances, Dana Levy ’21 has a lot going on. 

Levy is double majoring in English and gender and queer studies (GQS) with a minor in music. He’s also a violinist and active member of the Puget Sound LGBTQ community. (Levy identifies as transmasculine.) 

Last summer, however, looked like it would be pretty quiet. The coronavirus had nixed any prospects for a summer job, and by early June, the California native was, he says, “sitting around, twiddling my thumbs.” 

When retired Boeing executive John Monroe ’79 talks with high school students about careers in aerospace, he enjoys telling them he started at $1.92 an hour. “Their jaws kind of drop,” says Monroe. He goes on to tell them that, 37 years later, he was in charge of Boeing’s 777 airliner program. 

Until 2020, T’wina Nobles had no intention of running for the state Senate. She was doing work she loved as president and CEO of the Tacoma Urban League, and had just been re-elected to the University Place School Board. Community members and legislators had occasionally suggested she run for state office, and she would say, “Nope. It’s not my time.” 

When David Moore was a grad student at the University of Utah, his advisor, Paul Florsheim, invited Moore to help him develop an ambitious study of 1,000 young unwed parents. The researchers were especially interested in young fathers: “We explored what kind of fathers they hoped to be, what they were concerned about, what they were excited about,” says Moore, 49, a father of two who has taught at Puget Sound since 2002. They’ve turned their research into a book, Lost and Found: Young Fathers in the Age of Unwed Parenthood (Oxford University Press, 2020).

Artist, mom, and adventurer Abby Williams Hill paints a portrait of the American West in journals