She would get to fill two of the vacant storefront windows of the historic F.W. Woolworth building on Broadway with art installations that would be on public view alongside the work of more established artists.

For three and a half days in late August, roughly 700 first-year and transfer students explored the Seattle-Tacoma region by participating in one of 64 curated immersive experiences from mountains to museums.

Rare in Western Washington, this larger cousin to the more common cedar waxwing experienced an "irruption" last year, which, Will explains, is when a species expands into an area where it normally isn’t found. “I didn’t even see the bird, but I heard it—which still counts,” he says earnestly.

That’s according to In These Times magazine, which published an August 2015 article that connected climate change-induced fear to pre-traumatic stress disorder in millennials. Indeed, this generation has lived through some of the most destructive hurricanes in American history, severe droughts, and massive wildfires. But at the recent Cascade Climate Network Spring Fling conference held on campus, two dozen students were turning that fear into action.

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.”

Student researchers Shelby Kantner ’18 and Matthew Gulick ’18 want you to know that for each gallon of hot water in those millions of daily showers, the heating fuel used sends 1.92 pounds of carbon dioxide into our atmosphere. That’s a chunk of Co2 the weight of six iPhone 7s.

Last summer, two Puget Sound faculty members received some exciting news. They’d won a National Science Foundation grant to develop new course modules that would allow students to explore and experience real data collected by Arctic and Antarctic scientists.

Many Tacoma residents may not be aware that one of the country’s largest immigration detention centers is in their city. Evan Eurs ’18 certainly wasn’t before he began an internship with the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project (NWIRP), in partnership with Puget Sound’s Summer Immersion Internship Program.