The shape and form of a city are like an essay–a composition that is constantly being rewritten and revised by the social and political activity of the people who live in and use it. And like an essay, a city expresses arguments about who deserves the amenities that urban life offers. If that sounds like [...]

Continue Reading →

Service to one’s community—in whatever form people choose to offer it—brings people together, bridging ideological, cultural, values-based, and economic differences for the common good. For LeAnne Wiles, Student Academic Services Executive Director for First Year Programs & Strategic Initiatives in Undergraduate Academic Affairs, serving her community has, from a young age, been a conscious choice [...]

Continue Reading →

Meaningful recognition is a powerful motivator. People need to know that what they are doing matters. They need consistent acknowledgement of their value in an organization, and they need to be given recognition in a way that is significant to them. For nurses and other patient care providers, meaningful recognition might be the difference between [...]

Continue Reading →

Content warning: This article discusses sexual and domestic violence. Preventing problems before they occur. That’s a core value of community psychology, an interdisciplinary field that works to foster collective change, community wellness and the empowerment of marginalized and oppressed people. The field has a strong social justice bent, and practitioners are often passionate activists for [...]

Continue Reading →

Working the night shift is not for everyone. There’s that perpetual jet-lagged feeling resulting from shift-work sleep disorder, the strain on one’s social life, the detrimental health effects and the disconnect with family members and friends who operate on a daytime schedule. But for those with night-owl tendencies, the night shift can have its benefits: [...]

Continue Reading →

George Thomas Jr. first became interested in salmon when, as a student at Indiana University at Bloomington, he was recruited from an introductory stream ecology course to spend the summer on the Olympic Peninsula assisting a team of researchers studying coho salmon habitat. Working among tributaries feeding the Queets River the summer before his sophomore [...]

Continue Reading →

Colleges and universities around the world are experiencing a range of new and historically unmatched pressures for change. The structures, systems, built environments and resources that have served as the fundamental frameworks for higher education are no longer consistently meeting the needs of the diverse citizenry these institutions aim to serve. This is perhaps especially [...]

Continue Reading →

When Val Schweigert meets with a student in a one-to-one advising session, they* seldom lead with their status as a veteran of the U.S. Army Reserve. *Val uses the pronouns she/her and they/them interchangeably. This profile will emphasize this conscious choice by using them interchangeably as well.  Proudly genderqueer and fiercely progressive, Val does not [...]

Continue Reading →

Horacio de la Iglesia doesn’t always practice what he preaches. The sleep scientist and UW professor of biology, whose influential sleep research helped demonstrate the benefits of delaying school start times for Seattle high schoolers, knows that he should go to bed at roughly the same time each night. But on weekends, he likes to [...]

Continue Reading →

Sean Johnson moved to Seattle in 2010 with two goals in mind: he wanted to go to medical school at the UW School of Medicine, and he wanted to publicly come out as transgender and begin transitioning. He didn’t get into the UW School of Medicine. But he did pursue—and excel in—Master’s degree programs in [...]

Continue Reading →

Like many higher education professionals in disability services, Ian Campbell was driven to the vocation because of his personal experience with disability. Ian struggled with academics for years before finally being diagnosed in high school with learning disabilities. He characterizes the struggles before his diagnosis as “aptitude without performance”—the frustrating inability to fully demonstrate his [...]

Continue Reading →

Brooke Emrich is what you would call an extreme knitter. The educational seminars coordinator with the UW Department of Laboratory Medicine & Pathology spends a not insignificant amount time with needles in hand. In 2008, going through a period of creative stagnation, the self-described “knitting addict” picked up her first pair of needles, participating in [...]

Continue Reading →