The first year of college is hard. It’s even harder when you’re the only person from your family—maybe the only person you know—to pursue a college degree. Whether writing papers, declaring a major, or living with someone you just met, making the transition to college life can be more than a little intimidating. That’s where Student Success Advisor Najhan Bell steps in. A recent college graduate herself, Bell helps students, and first-generation college students in particular, adjust to life at Puget Sound and succeed academically.

TACOMA, Wash. – Incoming first-year students Mercer Stauch of Niwot, Colo., and Alex Bude of Boise, Idaho, are University of Puget Sound’s two newest Matelich Scholars. The pair were awarded the prestigious scholarship in recognition of their outstanding potential to excel academically, succeed as inspirational leaders, and give back to their communities through sustained personal growth and a lifetime relationship with the university. The Matelich Scholarship award covers tuition, fees, and room and board at Puget Sound for up to four years.

Tacoma, Wash. – Incoming first-year students Nora Panoscha of Portland, Ore., and Dominique Langevin of Coronado, Calif., have been named University of Puget Sound Lillis Scholars. The university's most prestigious and competitive award honoring incoming students for their academic excellence, the Lillis Scholarship covers tuition, fees, and room and board for up to four years.

When a catastrophic equipment failure struck the computational chemistry lab, Max and his fellow students acted quickly. In the span of a week, the team used their collective know-how to build a complex hardware and software system from scratch to get the lab up and running again. Max, an experienced computer builder, led the assembly of three new computers and increased the system’s existing power by more than 10 times in the process.

It’s 6 a.m. in Tacoma’s North End neighborhood, and everything is quiet except for the whistling of a group of white-crowned sparrows high in a tree at the end of an alley. Down below, Amanda Dougherty ’24 is watching the sparrows through her binoculars. She has an app pulled up on her phone to help identify the birds by their song, and she notes how many birds she sees in her notebook. Once she’s made her notes, it’s off to the next street on her route.

Browns Point Lighthouse Park is remarkably silent on a Tuesday morning in late July.

The gentle waves of the Puget Sound, tamed further by the embrace of Tacoma’s Commencement Bay, are barely audible. The hum of cars on nearby WA-509 fades as you walk down from the parking lot to the shore. Even the seabirds, hanging low and lazy in the sky, don’t break the peace. Everything at Browns Point is serene, right down to the quaint little art deco lighthouse.

The quiet makes the sudden excited energy from two barefoot college students seem all the more out of place.

In early August, with the summer sun high overhead downtown Tacoma, Chloe Pargmann-Hayes ’24 climbed the steps of Tollefson Plaza with a paint roller in hand to help put the finishing touches on a massive mural. This was the culmination of months of work to create the city’s first piece of public art honoring the Black Lives Matter movement. Pargmann-Hayes helped make the project a reality through her role as the project’s communications intern. Now, she was assisting the artists with the final touches.

Growing up in Portland, Ore., Bella Rodriguez ’24 was struck by the absence of Latino stories in the narrative of the city’s history. It wasn’t until she started studying history, environmental policy and decision making, and Latina/o studies at University of Puget Sound that she started to ask questions about the history of Latinos in Portland. That curiosity led her to dig deep into the city’s complicated racial history and uncover the story of the Cuban refugee community which sprang up overnight in the 1960s.

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