Ethos in Action

Advocating for Orcas

Emma Stafki ‘24 grew up on Washington’s Key Peninsula, hearing stories about the heart-wrenching capture of Hugo, a 3-year-old orca whale, in 1968. Stafki, a communication studies major with a concentration in film and media studies, decided to make Hugo the focus of her PLU capstone project. She created a documentary titled “Echos of the Sound” which explores the harsh realities facing the Southern Resident orca community.

Stafki has been making films with her younger sister, Annie, for almost a decade. The duo entered many of these into the Gig Harbor Film Festival, which they won three times. At PLU, Stafki has taken classes in multimedia production and advertising. The new tools she’s gained will help her launch and market her documentary, a project she continues to work on.

Inspired by Women

Global studies major Cora Beeson ‘24 spent most of her summers with family in Taiwan. While there, Beeson formed a bond with an Indonesian migrant worker named Watini who was her grandmother’s caretaker for eight years.

This bond with Watini inspired Beeson to travel to Yogyakarta, Indonesia for four months to research laws related to domestic violence, sexual assault and abortion.Her research culminated in a paper titled “The Unacknowledged and Underfunded Fight for Women’s Empowerment in Indonesia.” Beeson presented this research at the esteemed 2024 Human Development Conference at the University of Notre Dame.

While at PLU, Beeson has been involved in orchestra, dance, photography, art and ASPLU. She is also a Rieke Scholar, Harstad Founder’s Scholarship recipient and plans to study in Indonesia or conduct research in Taiwan.

Called to Criminal Justice

Criminal justice major Raphi Crenshaw ‘24 developed an interest in family and immigration law early on at PLU. That curiosity led to an internship at Tacoma Pro Bono, a free legal services and aid organization for Pierce County residents.

As an intern, Crenshaw’s primary responsibility is to assist clients in filling out their intake forms and providing information that will allow attorneys to place them into the proper legal clinic and get them the support they need. Crenshaw says that, time and time again, he’s seen clients walk through the organization’s front door “broken and defeated,” but by the time they leave, “they realize there is help for them, and that weight gets lifted off their shoulders.”

Crenshaw plans to attend law school after spending a year continuing to gain on-site experience in the criminal justice field.

Engineering a Bright Future

In his first computer science class at PLU, Stuart Gavidia ‘24 learned how quickly software can scale and impact people around the world. Gavidia declared computer science his major and immersed himself in his new field.

During his sophomore year, Gavidia was hired by Pierce County as a software development intern. “I worked as part of the I.T. department, and I got to work with a lot of front-end and back-end technologies.”

Gavidia interned at Amazon on the Alexa Notifications team during his junior year. He contributed to a project involving cutting-edge facial recognition technologies. “It was a complicated project but it was very rewarding, too.” That same year, his career took another significant step forward when he joined Cannon as a software engineer, working on an open source tool for managing smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain.

Amazon offered Gavidia a software engineering job weeks prior to commencement, and he plans to someday start his own software company.

Teaching a Universal Language

Teaching music in rural Namibia was a life-changing experience for music education major Jessa Delos Reyes ‘24. Reyes was a part of PLU’s Uukumwe Project, an educational partnership with Namibian educators. While in Namibia, Reyes had the unique opportunity to teach Western music concepts to students who wouldn’t otherwise have access to music education.

Because Reyes was only with these students for a limited time, she decided to focus on underlying concepts, like showing musical expression through movement. This came naturally to Reyes, though, recalling that part of her Filipino culture is centered around music and dance.