Kari Plog '11

“Mr. Wade! Mr. Wade! I need your help,” a few chimed in from different corners of the room.

Wade, alongside longtime teacher Darrell Chase, calmly commanded the classroom as though he had done it for years. Yet, the 38-year-old is in his second year of teaching, and he credits his immediate success to the intense preparation at Pacific Lutheran University through the Alternative Routes to Certification (ARC) program.

The intensive, primarily field-based program within the School of Education and Kinesiology offers individuals a high-quality, accelerated route to certification in high-needs educational areas, specifically special education.

Through the yearlong program, candidates gain hands-on classroom experience while simultaneously taking flexible classes that work around professional and family life.

“PLU does a fantastic job fast-tracking good, qualified teachers,” Wade said, adding that school districts don’t hesitate to bring a PLU graduate on board. “The brand speaks for itself. They are only endorsing and signing off on well qualified folks.”

PLU has already trained many new teachers through ARC. And a state grant has been helping the university train even more.

In 2016, the education department earned a block grant that totaled nearly $590,000 in funding spread over two years.

Districts involved in the partnership often identify non-certified candidates already working in the schools to enroll in PLU’s program, said Vanessa Tucker, assistant professor of education. She said schools recommend people with the expectation that they will be hired into full-time positions once the certification process is complete.

“The program supplies the teaching force with non-traditional students,” Tucker said, “people who would be wonderful additions to our field.”

Wade is certified to teach special education and earned a language arts endorsement through the program. He teaches five class periods a day at Sylvester Middle School, where he was paired with a mentor and completed his internship during his time in ARC. Wade said he secured the full-time job before he even finished the program, something many of the peers in his cohort were able to do, as well.

“It allowed me to hit the ground running,” he said of ARC. “I was able to jump right in and make it happen.”

Wade said teaching at Sylvester has its challenges. About 73 percent of the students qualify for free or reduced lunch at the high-poverty school. But ARC prepared the husband and father of three with a rigorous education, Wade said, all without disrupting his life outside PLU. The former small business owner said he always, in the back of his mind, considered becoming a teacher. PLU made that distant thought a reality.

“I really felt that was the best fit,” he said.

Hibbs said ARC gives access to individuals who otherwise might not have the chance to earn a certification: “This is providing a way to increase diversity and provide a pipeline of people who aren’t on the traditional route.”

According to a survey conducted by the state Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction in 2015, 45 percent of principals say they weren’t able to fill all of their teaching jobs with fully certified candidates. More than 80 percent were required to employ teachers with emergency certificates or as long-term substitutes, and 93 percent indicated that they were “struggling” or in a “crisis” mode for finding qualified candidates.

Tucker underscored the need for teachers, especially those in high-needs areas. She said the district partnerships tout a “grow your own” philosophy that creates a direct route for candidates with a proven track record of success in the classroom.

“This really places the partnership at the forefront,” Tucker said. “Districts are desperate for people.”

And the people PLU certifies are not only quality candidates, but diverse, fun professionals with a lot to offer: “The diversity and background of these people is huge,” Tucker said. “They bring tremendous life experience with them.”

Busy is an understatement. Inmate populations often run the gamut of health care needs: men ages 18 and beyond — some who have never seen a doctor in their lives, Larsen said — who require everything from treatment for chronic conditions and medical emergencies, to inpatient services and psychiatric care.

And that feeling was precisely what Larsen was after when he made a midlife career change more than a decade ago.

Larsen, who studied evolution and avian ecology at The Evergreen State College, worked as a biologist for the state Department of Fish and Wildlife. As he rose through the ranks, his tasks became more and more sequestered.

“The idea of working for the sake of working has never been appealing to me,” Larsen said. “I came to a realization that there wasn’t a whole lot of making a difference, it was a whole lot of trying.”

“It brings diversity and richness to nursing that we wouldn’t get otherwise,” Seavor said, underscoring the diverse backgrounds and life experiences entry-level students bring to the program, and to their patient care once they complete their degrees. “They really add a lot to the profession.”

Like Larsen, Seavor said, many PLU nursing students — entry-level master’s and otherwise — are drawn to the field because of an overwhelming urge to serve.

“Many people choose nursing as a career to make a difference in the lives of others,” she said. “Nursing care does make a difference in health outcomes.”

“It’s very rich in seeing complexity. It’s rich in dealing with very difficult patients,” he said, noting the prevalence of psychosocial and mental health issues. “You’ll see things you’ll see nowhere else. You never know what you’re going to find.”

With that variety of care, a student leaves equipped with the confidence that they can do just about anything in primary care, he added.

“What I work on a lot is confidence building and getting people to the point where they trust that they are making good decisions,” Larsen said.

And, he says, that isn’t a tough job with the PLU nurses he works with.

But, he says, all the trouble is worth it:

“It’s hugely satisfying. I’m 58 years old now. I’m not going to be able to pull this off forever. It’s a young person’s sport to put in 12-hour days. But as long as I can deal with it, I will.”

“There are few companies who rebel against the government and allow Baha’is to work,” she said. “He wanted me to have my feet on solid ground.”

Sabet-Kazilas, now a graduate of PLU’s Marriage and Family Therapy program, found solid ground and is building on it.

She has a baby with her husband, Ignas Sabet-Kazilas ’14, and is working to start a private practice. She wants to serve refugees and immigrants, as they navigate the trauma of their own marginalization in the U.S.

“There is so much that I can resonate with, the oppression they have gone through,” she said. “I understand a lot of things they have experienced.”

Sabet-Kazilas says gaining graduate-level admission to PLU represented years of hard work and resilience. She graduated in 2008 with a degree in psychology from the Baha’i Institute for Higher Education, which was founded in 1987 in response to the Iranian government’s campaign to block Baha’i followers from pursuing higher education. She earned a bachelor’s degree despite a lifetime of intimidation in Iranian primary schools.

“With my parents’ perseverance, I was able to get into the elementary school,” she said. “However, religious harassment and oppression remained a part of my school years. Me and my other Baha’i friends were asked to renounce our faith and claim that we are Muslim. When we refused that, their harassment got worse and eventually we all got expelled from school. Some of my friends had to move to another city in order to get enrolled in schools.”

Even after all she had overcome, though, getting into PLU’s graduate program wasn’t the end.

“In that moment I was filled with fear,” she recalled. “Now what?”

Sabet-Kazilas was in disbelief as she contemplated what came after the acceptance letter and “generous scholarship offer,” she said.

“I could not believe that a new chapter of my life was beginning,” she said. “I was at once proud of what I have achieved and hesitant of the unknown.”

Still, Sabet-Kazilas embraced her decision to become a Lute. She traveled to the U.S. embassy in Dubai to apply for a visa, just a few short months before she was due on campus in August.

When July came and the visa didn’t, Sabet-Kazilas doubted her dream of becoming a therapist would be realized.

But her supporters at PLU — who were wowed from the moment they interviewed Sabet-Kazilas half a world away — couldn’t let her newest journey end before it started: “Don’t lose hope,” they told her. “You’ve come a long way.”

“They were so kind,” Sabet-Kazilas said. “They didn’t give up on me, and I was so happy that I found a place that has faith in someone out of the country.”

PLU graduate admission staff emailed the embassy on her behalf and uncovered the long-lost visa, just 10 days before orientation began.

Sabet-Kazilas’ desire to come to the U.S. grew out of her desire to serve other marginalized Iranians. She worked with underprivileged populations back home, teaching life skills and empowering young people. She also taught English classes privately out of her home.

“I had a strong desire to serve my country and people,” she said. “Through our educational work, I learned that I needed to know more about family dynamics in order to be more effective serving this population. … I came to a conclusion that marriage and family therapy could provide me with skills and expertise needed.”

After two years of research, Sabet-Kazilas applied to roughly 20 programs in the U.S. Only a handful of them — PLU included — accepted her BIHE degree. PLU was her top choice. It had everything: national accreditation, an on-site clinic, rigorous academics, an inclusive environment.

David Ward, director of the university’s Marriage and Family Therapy program, says the MFT cohorts are more valuable when they welcome students such as Sabet-Kazilas.

“We get to work with all those differences in the classroom,” Ward said. “And that’s great because those are the exact same differences you get to work with as a therapist.”

Ward says the field of marriage and family therapy focuses on relationships and contexts as core factors in mental health treatment and relational functioning. “We can only understand ourselves through our interactions with others,” he said.

The key is treating the whole person, where they are at, taking into consideration race, gender identity, religion, socioeconomic status, and all other contexts that shape a person.

“Where we find ourselves in relation to our world really matters,” Ward said. “We want to really recognize that a person’s place in the world influences them.”

To remain authentic in that pursuit, Ward says it’s imperative that MFT students engage that approach themselves as they learn. In addition to welcoming undergraduates from a variety of disciplines, Ward says they work hard to find students with diverse life experiences. It’s a big reason Sabet-Kazilas stood out, he noted.

“In our program, you’re going to be challenged to work with people who aren’t like you, and we really value that,” Ward said, adding that it mirrors the work they’ll do later as therapists. “You don’t get to pick and choose who you work with when they walk into the room, and you have to be able to value where they’re at. That is a key aspect of our program.”

“Studying while practicing really made that experience rich,” Sabet-Kazilas said of the program’s clinical component.

Clinic services are priced on a sliding scale, which helps serve uninsured people and those who need services not covered by insurance. Students provide about 10,000 hours of direct client care annually both at the clinic and through internships in surrounding communities, Ward said.

“Community mental health would come to a halt if programs like ours didn’t exist,” he said.

Just as the therapists in training are sitting with their clients in difficult moments in the clinic and internships across Pierce County, they also are sitting with their own vulnerabilities in the classroom.

Ward said the cohort model in the MFT program allows students to build trust with their peers in a small group of about 20.

“The types of conversations you can have with people you’ll be with for two years are different than the ones you’ll have with people you’re going to be with for 15 weeks,” he said, stressing the sense of support and authenticity that results from those classroom discussions. “These are relationships that start in the program and last for a very long time.”

Ward says the context surrounding Sabet-Kazilas isn’t just a benefit to the cohort she graduated with; it’s a benefit to her future clients.

“There’s an empathy and an understanding that clients will experience from Shiva that they won’t experience from others who haven’t lived through that experience,” he said. “Her experience allows her to connect with pain, connect with suffering, connect with courage, connect with resiliency. It allows her to connect and have that credibility in the room that someone like me would not have, because I haven’t lived it.”

Sabet-Kazilas acknowledges that her trauma resonates with the growing needs of refugees and immigrants in her newfound home. But she’s also quick to acknowledge her “safety network” — the collective strength that came with experiencing trauma alongside others.

“I felt like I was the eyes of my relatives and friends who were deprived of this opportunity,” she said. “I wanted them to experience every second of what I was experiencing. That was a historic moment in my life and I needed to have a visual memory of what happened.”

His excitement started with a networking trip to Starbucks headquarters in April 2016, through PLU career and alumni offices, and a wealth of knowledge passed down from Tom Harvey, a now-retired Campus Restaurants employee who previously worked for Starbucks.

The visit to headquarters was the first time Doan realized the nuances of coffee: the differences in flavor, methods of production and brewing, and the human touch behind it all.

And it was when he first learned about the Starbucks mission — to inspire and nurture the human spirit one person, one cup and one neighborhood at a time.

“I had never known that side of Starbucks,” said Doan, who didn’t drink much of the company’s coffee until he started spending a lot of time studying there in college. (He grew up on Vietnamese coffee, a much stronger brew, served with condensed milk.)

Ann-Marie Kurtz ’93, manager on the global coffee and tea education team, still remembers Doan’s enthusiasm the day he first visited. “He was so wide-eyed and curious,” Kurtz said, passing by just before the daily coffee tasting began at corporate’s WorkShop 9.

Doan joined the brief gathering, as he often does, where he and fellow partners sipped and compared cold brews. “It’s part of Starbucks culture,” he noted.

The demonstration mirrored the one that spurred Doan’s desire to learn more. “There were so many things I didn’t know about the company,” he said.

So, he decided to dedicate his culminating research project in the MSMR program to his newfound passion. He regularly met with Harvey, the former Starbucks employee, who provided Doan with literature ranging from books authored by CEO Howard Schultz to internal newsletters underscoring company culture. “It helped me understand and grew my interest,” Doan said.

That’s when he decided to become a partner, as Starbucks employees are called. The shiny new store invigorated him further.

“Everything was brand new. It looked so nice and crisp,” Doan said. “I got to build a relationship with the customer from Day One.”

And he got to take pictures. Lots of them.

“I just kind of documented my journey,” he said. “I photographed the first latte I made, the first pumpkin spice latte, and my favorite drink (a white chocolate mocha with four shots of espresso).”

Starbucks noticed.

The company actively searches for user-generated content, so when one of its baristas started posting drink after drink after drink on Instagram, people in charge could only repost his content for so long.

“I was in awe,” said Maren Hamilton, a former social media strategist for Starbucks who now works for an affiliated marketing agency in Denver.

Hamilton showed Doan’s work to the rest of the team. “Everyone was super impressed.”

She reached out to Doan and invited him back to the corporate office, where it all began. “I recognized his passion and his creativity, both for coffee and for the Starbucks brand.”

So, she pushed hard for the team to give him a shot. And they did. After serving a time-limited assignment, Doan was promoted to a full-time position in August 2017.

Doan said the experience he gained through the program gives him a big-picture understanding of the “why” behind his creative work with Starbucks.

“It helped me understand how a decision is made,” Doan said. “It’s not just coming from nowhere. It’s so easy now to collect data, but people are still struggling to figure out what you can do with it.”

Mulder said graduates of the MSMR program are equipped to do just that. “It’s important to have data literacy,” he said, noting that it offers “more robust insights.”

“PLU’s program focuses on this as a critical skill,” Mulder said.

The approach is coupled with client projects that give graduate students real-world experience that places the learning in context, Mulder added. Clients working with MSMR students include corporations, such as REI, to governmental agencies, such as the Washington Traffic Safety Commission. The latter even invited a student to present research at the commission’s statewide conference, Mulder said.

Then, there are graduates like Doan, Mulder said, who use the baseline knowledge to better inform creative endeavors and branding goals.

And the experience comes in handy in a near-surgical creative environment that curates Starbucks’ story: copywriters, designers, photographers, producers, marketers and more all working together to tailor content to each platform.

“Every single piece — a period, a comma, an emoji — has been seen by at least 10 people,” Doan stressed, adding that production is often a monthslong process. “It’s super cool to see all that happen.”

It’s the culmination of a lot of passion, care and self-actualization that Mulder says the MSMR program equips all graduate students to embrace.

“Students get a chance to say, ‘what is it that I love,’ try it out and then go out and achieve their ideal or their dream job in the type of industry or company that they would most prefer,” he said.

And in some cases — especially Doan’s — the dream job finds them.

“It all aligned,” Doan said, with a smile.

“Has it happened yet?” her husband immediately asked upon hearing the news, knowing his wife’s next move was likely a question of “when” not “if.”

“Everybody kind of knew,” Swift recalled of her decision to buy the store.

The serendipitous timing was practically poetic.

Swift purchased Seattle-based Open Books: A Poem Emporium just as she finished the Master of Fine Arts program at Pacific Lutheran University. The Rainier Writing Workshop — a three-year, low-residency program — provided Swift an outlet to pursue a graduate degree in creative writing.

Open Books provided an outlet to continue to foster the community she built within the program.

“The driving force was just that I wanted a poetry bookstore to exist,” Swift said. “But knowing I would be able to stay connected to the poetry community was good to know.”

The store is one of only a handful of its kind in the country. It carries more than 10,000 titles and provides a place for enthusiasts and poets alike to quietly peruse, read or talk to like-minded customers. It also hosts regular events, such as readings.

“Hopefully, any name someone knows as a poet we carry in the store,” Swift said.

Rick Barot, director of PLU’s MFA program, is a longtime customer. He already knew about Open Books before moving to the Tacoma area in 2005, when he joined PLU as an assistant professor of English. He took over the MFA in 2014, a program now entering its 15th year.

“One of the first things I did when I arrived here was make a pilgrimage,” said Barot, now an associate professor. “I made it a policy, personally, that all the poetry-related books that I buy I only buy from them. I know other poets who have that policy.”

Swift took that policy to the next level when she took over the bookstore from John Marshall and Christine Deavel, the original owners who ran the shop since 1995.

Raising children complicated matters; she wanted to be present. So she started to look into low-residency programs, ones that offered both rigor and flexibility. She also craved intense mentorship.

Rainier Writing Workshop was the perfect fit, so perfect she wondered if it was too good to be true.

“I realized it was exactly what I was looking for,” Swift said. “The emphasis of the program was on figuring out what being a writer means to the individual, and not necessarily trying to figure out how to be a successful writer. I was definitely more interested in the former.”

Barot says that’s by design.

“We have a structure, but we don’t have a curriculum,” he said of the program. “All of these people are coming here with very different backgrounds and levels of knowledge beforehand. Each mentor has to tailor their mentorship to what each writer is doing.”

The MFA — with concentrations in the genres of fiction, nonfiction and poetry — spans three years with an immersive 10-day residency at the start of each year, complete with morning-to-night readings, workshops and lectures.

The most recent residency, for example, included a panel of five faculty members addressing one question: “Why did the writer cross the genre?”

The writers discussed their experiences working across genres: the internal tension, the infusion of creativity, the challenges, the unexpected triumphs. Dozens of MFA students, hooked on every word, scribbled notes and intently listened. One attendee was overcome with emotion as she asked a question at the end, apparently grappling with insecurities within her own process.

Swift says that’s not uncommon.

“Everybody cries at some point,” she said. “You leave loaded with this desire and urgency and bewilderment. All at once. Because you’ve now just been inundated with really great poetry, with really great thoughts on poetry, with a cohort that is writing really great poetry, and now you get to go home and figure out where you fit in all of that.”

The remainder of the MFA work happens between the students and “intentionally attentive” faculty mentors, as Barot describes them. Each month, students work on assigned readings and write critical papers for review by their mentors. The work isn’t always limited to one genre, Barot said: “What’s interesting about us is we celebrate multi-genre work. Writers might study other genres or be asked to study other genres to explore their creativity.”

And the faculty mentors are key to emboldening that exploration: “These moves across genres can actually fuel more interesting work,” Rebecca McClanahan told the captivated group during the residency panel.

The mentors meet or talk regularly with their assigned writers, and the monthly work evolves to cater to each individual writer.

“Different people have different ambitions and goals,” Barot said, stressing that some students want to be published, while others simply want to be better writers. The program honors those diverse goals, he added. “It’s kind of an ethos that we really value and practice in the program. It’s rigorous, but supportive.”

Swift says that ethos extends beyond the Rainier Writing Workshop to the larger poetry community, and lives in the bookstore she’s owned for just over two years.

“We are hungry to read each other and support each other,” she said of poets.

And Swift says encountering poetry — whether it’s dissecting its meaning or just feeling something — is so important to experience in community.

“It’s a solitary act, the act of writing. But you do it because it’s also a gesture outward,” she said. “Having space for that outward moment, to allow that to happen, there are some spaces, but there aren’t a lot.”

That’s at the heart of Open Books, as well as the Rainier Writing Workshop at PLU.

Barot believes the MFA program planted the seed that grew into Swift’s desire to acquire Open Books, and continues to empower writers to come out of solitude.

“Your tool kit should feel really heavy, in a good way,” Barot said.

Swift’s tool kit is overflowing, and she’s using it to share poetry with everyone. Because poetry is for everyone, she says. “Poetry is the act of expressing, thinking, feeling all at once,” she said. “I like to remind people that poetry is there for them.”

And, Barot says, Open Books is there for the genre, thanks to Swift. “It’s a symbol for how important poetry is,” he said.

Swift is back to focusing on her own work, something she drifted from amid the whirlwind of the bookstore purchase. “I write small poems, and I take a while to do it,” she said. “My body of work is not huge.”

Her chapbook, based on her MFA creative thesis, is scheduled to publish in May of next year.

In the meantime, she’ll continue to invite poets — from the Rainier Writing Workshop and elsewhere — to sit in the thick of it with her at Open Books, celebrating poetry in all its forms.

“There’s this heartbeat we’re all circling, and we can’t name it,” she said. “But we’re all trying to.”