Profiles
Kunal Nayyar ‘03 Challenge Gift for Performing Arts
Kunal Nayyar ’03, star from the Big Bang Theory, has pledged to give $200,000 to support the Performing Arts Department in the College of Arts and Sciences. Kunal hopes to inspire at least 100 donors to make a gift to any designation in the College of Arts and Sciences campaign. When this goal is reached, his gift will provide support for performing arts students and programs.
Join the challenge starting tomorrow at 12:00 p.m.! On April 4-5 from noon to noon, the UP community will come together for our first ever day of giving:#PilotsGive. With nearly $400,000 in challenge funds available, University of Portland has an ambitious goal of securing 1000 donors in one day! #PilotsGive is OUR chance to make UP stronger. pilotsgive.up.edu Together we all add UP!
Rebecca Chavez: Hightower Scholarship Recipient
Rebecca Chavez, this year’s recipient of Molly Hightower scholarship, has “taken advantage of all that UP has to offer”
Rebecca Chavez, a University of Portland senior, barely recalls a time when service was not part of her life.Recipient of this year’s Molly Hightower Endowed Scholarship, Chavez was under the age of 10 when she regularly volunteered with her family at a home for developmental disabled adults. Her job included transporting the home’s residents via wheelchair to Sunday Mass.
“It was often noisy in those Masses,” she said. “But I realized they were praising God just like anyone else.”
“I have been doing service since I could walk,” she added. “My mother is an immigrant, and my father was born to immigrant parents, so my siblings and I grew up with understandings of social justice.”
Chavez, born and raised in Santa Clara, near San Francisco, is majoring in Spanish and social work and minoring in communication studies. She is the third recipient of the Molly Hightower Scholarship. The scholarship was established by the Class of 2010 in memory of Hightower, who died in the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti while volunteering with special-needs orphans. [Read more…] about Rebecca Chavez: Hightower Scholarship Recipient
Charity Taylor, Political Science Major, 2013
When Charity Taylor speaks of her experience at UP, her enthusiasm is nearly overwhelming. A Political Science major, a Mock Trial team member, an aspiring teacher and law student–Charity is a perfect example of the way CAS has made a difference in a student’s life.
Charity discusses why she chose UP, her experiences here, and her hopes for the future on an upcoming episode of Speaking UP!
John Orr on the Value of a Liberal Arts Education
At the age of eighteen, I did not know that I had an accent. Emerson, in his essay “Circles,” says that “the life of a man is a self-evolving circle, which, from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to new and larger circles.” If this is true, the circle of my existence at 18 was extremely small and circumscribed by ideologies that derived from my heritage as a third generation Texan whose father hailed from North Carolina. My childhood on a working farm was in many ways idyllic, though fraught with hardships such as the lack of potable water in the house I grew up in. At age 12, instead of a bar mitzvah, I received a .22 rifle, and between throwing a baseball endlessly against the side of the barn and shooting at any number of creatures and objects, I managed to pass lazy summers playing by myself. [Read more…] about John Orr on the Value of a Liberal Arts Education