GLOBAL CONNECTIONS, INDIVIDUAL LIVES
Humanities majors at WSU have abundant opportunities to contribute to the greater community.
For instance, WSU students and alumni team up to volunteer for Hearts in Motion, a nonprofit organization that provides care and medical treatment to communities in Central America.
Each spring break, Spanish majors and other volunteers travel to Guatemala to facilitate communication between Zacapa residents and the English-speaking medical personnel.
Student volunteers can apply for WSU departmental scholarships to assist with travel expenses.
FILLING GAPS IN HISTORY
WSU students are helping create a new type of digital archive that is changing the way indigenous peoples interact with artifacts housed at WSU and enabling interactive cultural information exchange.
Professors and students in critical culture, gender, and race studies are collaborating with WSU's Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections and Museum of Anthropology to digitally catalog Columbia Plateau tribes' cultural materials that are in WSU collections.
The result is the Plateau Peoples' Web Portal. Designed with the values of indigenous peoples in mind, it helps repatriate cultural belongings and promote shared knowledge between all people interested in the area's history.
LEARN FROM WORLD-CLASS PERFORMERS
When you play music at WSU — whether it's your major or simply something you love to do — you learn from world-class directors, musicians, and composers who have a passion for helping you develop your musical talent.
Two examples:
- Jeffrey Savage and Karen Hsiao Savage, who play as a piano duo internationally, and recently played New York's Carnegie Hall as the winners of the Special Presentation Award at the 36th annual Artists International Presentation competition.
Listen to a clip of a Savage duo performance.
- Greg Yasinitsky, who teaches saxophone and composition and coordinates the University's nationally recognized jazz studies program. He won a 2009-2010 ASCAPLUS Award for Composition from ASCAP, a 2009 Artist Trust Fellowship, and has won 24 ASCAP awards. His compositions have been played worldwide.
Find out more about the WSU music program and the musicians you can learn from on the WSU School of Music website.
World-class thinkers come to you
In addition to learning from your professors, at WSU you also get opportunities to hear directly from scholars of national and international reputation, who come to Pullman to share their ideas on timely topics.
- Each year the Potter Memorial Lectureship and the Inland Northwest Philosophy Conference bring renowned philosophers, such as Daniel Dennett and Noam Chomsky, to WSU.
- The Visiting Writers Series hosts readings and discussions with local, national, and international authors.
- National and international scholars come to Pullman to share their ideas in guest lectures or even to spend a semester or a year teaching advanced students.