It is safe to say older women have changed my life. I only have 500 words or less to tell-all, so I will save the stories behind my acting career (an older woman), Aquaponics interest (an older woman), and my mom (a younger woman), focusing on one of the most important cougars ever to cross my path: Amy Lerner. Amy is a geography professor at Rutgers University who first got me hooked on geography while we traveled together in the Amazon...

Why Reed? Because I want to learn everything forever. Because I want to study geography, philosophy, and history at a world-class institution where I can also study theatre, writing, and film in a world-class city. Because I want to go to a place that lets me start sentences with because and then challenges me as to why. Because your lack of emphasis on arbitrary letter grades and resistance to a one-size-fits-all education inspires me everyday to relentlessly pursue my own...

The University of Chicago, as I know it now, satisfies me because I want to learn everything forever. Because I want to study geography at a world-class institution where I can also study theatre in a world-class city. Because Chicago is the only place where I can study Burgess’ urban land use policy in the classroom where he first taught it, play an Ultimate match on the Midway, and screen an original film I created in my own eleven-story arts...

Interdisciplinary learning is not only my modus operandi, it is also my “life, my love, and my lady”, to quote the 1970s one hit wonder Looking Glass. Learning in a bubble is more prevalent then ever and it is a shame that most of academia is so hyper-specialized that solving society’s immense problems have become almost impossible in a school environment. At Evergreen State, I see the polar opposite. Cross-fertilization is the name of the game and the Geoducks...

What are a few of my favorite things? Everything about Julie Andrews, for one, but without listing fifty million assorted books and movies, one of my most recent favorite things is composer Kenley Kristofferson’s hauntingly beautiful Venture To The Cosmos, (run, do not walk to listen to it), a choral suite in three movements that sets Carl Sagan’s words to original orchestration. Listening to the first movement, my imagination always ventures “to worlds that never were” when Sagan...

Where is Waldo, really? Right in front of me. Cradling my dog-eared and much loved copy of Find Waldo Now, I embark on a trip through time, much like Waldo’s own journey through the ages though I do not have that creepy wizard tagging along with me. I have been trying to answer this prompt ever since I was a little kid, and I will take it one step further: Why the hell does Waldo keep getting lost? After...