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.
Ella Slattery ’25 had only been on campus for a few weeks when she laid eyes on the plasma chamber. As a first-year student at University of Puget Sound, she was on a tour of the physics department and got to chatting with postdoctoral researcher Brett Klaasen Von Oorschot about a project he was working on with some of his students—a small, silver device connected to a mass of wires and sitting on a rolling cart.
“I’d never seen a fusor before. It was utterly fascinating,” Slattery recalls. “I immediately knew I wanted to get involved and learn as much as I could about it.”
It’s midmorning at Driveline Baseball, a performance training facility in Kent, Wash., and Kevin Covarrubias ’23 is spraying a thin layer of adhesive on the skin of an athlete in preparation for attaching 45 reflective markers to their arms, legs, chest, and back. Once the markers are in place, he has them step into the center of a massive, motion-capture camera rig that will record their tiniest movements, track the movement of each marker, and send the data to a computer for analysis. It’s all part of the company’s data-driven approach to helping baseball players perfect their form.
After returning from a summer studying abroad in East Asia, where she was studying cultural taboos around tattoos, Morgan MacFarlane ’21 had a polished paper ready to publish, but couldn’t find an outlet that would take her research as an undergraduate. She knew other Puget Sound students were conducting interesting research, too, but didn’t have the qualifications to submit to an academic journal to share it with the wider community. So, she decided to start her own.
For Zia Kloetzel ’25, who goes by the stage name Zia Blue, the journey to American Idol began on Instagram. In June 2021, just a couple of months before arriving on campus for her first semester, Kloetzel posted a clip of herself singing “Sixty Years” by Sophia James to her Instagram account. A few hours later, she received a direct message from one of the show’s senior producers inviting her to audition for Idol’s 20th anniversary season. It was the start of a whirlwind experience that would take her all the way to the historic Orpheum Theatre in Hollywood.
