Over the next four years, she studied under a world-class pianist, Duane Hulbert, at the University of Puget Sound. As a first-year student she was “badgered into excellence” by a senior who convinced her to practice for five hours a day, and she graduated feeling burned out.

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.