essay
March 5, 2022
Living through history
UW history professor Margaret O’Mara shares her perspective on the pandemic and its echoes from the past.
May 11, 2021
The adventure gap
Money isn’t the only challenge. Racist and classist gatekeeping of hiking spaces also impedes the ability to access the outdoors.
June 20, 2020
New reality for students
A graduating student reflects on the coronavirus outbreak that disrupted the last half of her senior year.
June 14, 2020
Impact from afar
The UW faculty are impactful even when they find themselves having to venture into uncomfortable territory. They “flatten the curve” while still producing and disseminating knowledge.
June 10, 2020
Stranger than fiction
A writer faces frustration with the release of her first work of fiction during a pandemic.
May 12, 2020
The lost spring
Just as all schools and colleges have closed down this year from late March because of COVID-19, my senior year ended early in 1980.
September 2, 2019
Saving time
Benefits to daylight saving time? Let me shine some light on the ways it makes life better.
June 3, 2019
A week in ‘Baby Jail’
As a former undocumented immigrant, I felt it was my duty to help.
June 4, 2018
Legends of the IMA
Why did we keep playing softball even after graduating? Because we loved softball and the IMA league was much more fun than other leagues. And we really wanted those championship T-shirts.
March 1, 2015
A close shave
Autumn 1974. The Cold War had yet to show any signs of thawing, Czechoslovakia still existed and the Iron Curtain was still drawn tight. It was, my buddy and I decided, the perfect time for two UW students to paddle a two-man kayak from the Black Forest in Western Germany to the Black Sea in Romania.
September 1, 2014
Beloved Linda
None of us knows what adversities life will bring. It was more than fifteen years ago, in 1999, when I first discovered that my wife, Linda, was having serious problems with short-term memory loss. It was the first stage of early-onset Alzheimer's disease.
March 1, 2014
Me and my dad
The first time I approached Everest’s summit in ‘94, tears ran down my face as a deep sense of connection to my father welled up inside of me — a connection as a climber I had finally earned a right to call my own.
December 1, 2013
Undaunted
June 6, 1966 marked a memorable date in what, retrospectively, was to begin an improbable journey to the University of Washington.
A new era
Husky coaching legend Don James died on Oct. 20 at age 80. Paul Strohmeier, ’77, a defensive lineman when James was hired and a graduate- assistant coach under James in 1976, offers a perspective on the beginning of the “Dawgfather” era.
March 1, 2013
Lake life
Living on a houseboat was a way of life that brought about a great deal of companionship, sharing and good humor.
December 1, 2012
Essay: For the 151st time
Please know this much about our University. Lots of change and learning will go on here and for all the grand work we do, we are equally adept at showing and modeling care for one another, inspiration, devotion, passion and compassion.
December 1, 2011
Soldier's story
As I reflect on the road that led me from the UW to the Udari Desert, it is easy for me to identify ways that my time at the UW earning a B.S. in Construction Management prepared me to lead troops.
March 1, 2009
A very odd year
In the early 1970s, while earning my master’s degree in political science from the UW, I lived in a halfway house for psychiatric outpatients. I was not a psychiatric outpatient myself, but it was the only place I could find that had rooms for rent.
December 1, 2008
Escape from Shanghai
Going off to college can be difficult, even traumatic—leaving home for the first time, moving to an unfamiliar town, living with strangers. For Julia Lin, ’65, though, it required assuming a false identity, dodging bombs and surviving a pirate attack.
September 1, 1999
Class acts
When we ran tributes on UW professors from nine alumni/authors in our last issue, we invited you to write the next page.