Whitman Stories

Cancellation of the spring athletic seasons due to COVID-19 was a heartbreaking turn of events for the college’s scholar-athletes.

This spring, Evangelos Sarantinos ’20 was awarded a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship to study rare disease and caregivers around the world.

Cameron Conner ’20 believes strongly in the power of communities. He demonstrates that it in his actions, whether that’s volunteering as a wrestling coach at a Spokane, Washington, high school, becoming certified as an EMT, co-founding a nonprofit or helping the city of Walla Walla create a neighborhood-building program. Moving forward, he’ll dig deeper into what makes communities work as a recipient of the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship.

Entrepreneur Matt Dittrich ’12 is passionate about giving back to Whitman and its students in gratitude for the scholarship that made his education possible.

The earliest records of the Senior Fund date to 1986, and it raised nearly $200,000 to support different aspects of the college. The Class of 2013 holds the record for donations, with 65% of the class contributing for a total of over $15,000.

Sarah Murphy ‘21 knows that being a role model for kids can make a big difference, that is why she decided to give back to the Walla Walla community through the Friends of Walla Walla program where she helps mentor elementary school students.

Willamette University Chemistry Professor Sarah Kirk has been awarded a National Institutes of Health grant for her work toward a drug that would stop the progression of eye disease before it leads to blindness.

The five capstone teams int he Department of Computer Science presented their senior projects in the first ever virtual computer science conference on April 18, 2020.

Under normal circumstances, students in Associate Professor Tim Parker’s Natural History and Ecology lab course participate in weekly, five-hour field trips around eastern Washington. Parker didn’t want his students to miss out on the opportunity to learn in the field now that Whitman College has moved to online learning in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. So Parker is bringing the field to them, adapting his field trips and using video and photographs to make the trips accessible to his 22 students.

Aleksandra Ross ’14 believes that she wouldn’t have written the same book if it weren’t for her Whitman education. Ross’ first young adult novel will be released April 28, 2020. Titled “Don’t Call the Wolf,” the book is fantasy at a faster pace, Ross said, and is heavily influenced by Polish and Slavic folklore.

A private donation by the Whitman faculty member and her husband, Dr. Richard Simon, anchored fundraising for the Providence St. Mary Foundation's rollout of the Cepheid GeneXpert platform that, when fully functional, will produce test results in about 45 minutes.

Whitman College debate team partners Ava Liponis ’23 and Susanna Williams ’20 had a lot on their minds as they prepared for the novice finals of the National Parliamentary Debate Association’s national championship tour in March, and it wasn’t just how they were going to craft, propose and defend their arguments. Whitman’s team of debaters competing at nationals had just received the news that the college would move all class instruction online due to the COVID-19 outbreak.