But after being seated next to Danielle Rogers ’18, herself a talented soprano who was then a senior in high school, Rhiannon couldn’t help talking about her alma mater. On Rhiannon’s recommendation, Danielle enrolled at Puget Sound. She graduated from the School of Music in May.

In 1938, Mary Louise Curran ’36 entered an essay contest that would change her life and her community forever. The topic was “Why I want to live in University Place,” and the goal was to advertise a newly developed subdivision close to the Puget Sound campus. She wrote: 

He’d long harbored an affinity for the bizarre comedy of Monty Python and experimental filmmaker Peter Greenaway, and would frequently play those movies on repeat.

But there, among the fleece pullovers and down jackets, that’s exactly what happened.

She had just graduated from Puget Sound with an English degree and didn’t know what to do next. “I thought I was going to go to law school like my parents did, but my friend, Anni Kelley-Day ’03, had this opportunity to live at her uncle’s apartment in New York,” Anna recalls. “She asked, ‘Why don’t you come with?’ And I did.”

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.”