Alumni contributed some $43,000 to the SVM Charter Class of 1987 Scholarship Fund for those who want to be veterinarians. Bryce Richter

The inaugural class at the UW’s School of Veterinary Medicine (SVM) led the way as the first graduates in 1987, and now they’re leading the way again, in supporting others who want to become veterinarians.

Brad Poff DVM’87, one of the members of that first class, thought it would be a great idea for the class to create an endowed scholarship.

“We’re at an age when we’re retiring, we’re setting up estate plans— so it seemed like a great time to establish our charter class scholarship,” he says.

Poff rallied his peers to give some $43,000 to the SVM Charter Class of 1987 Scholarship Fund. “I hadn’t really been in contact with many of these folks for a long time,” he says. “I spent hours on the phone with people that I hadn’t talked to since vet school — it was a fun experience.”

Pete Gaveras DVM’87, who was one of the first to jump on board, agrees. “I personally am very proud of how our class came together with a common goal,” he says. The exchange of jokes and banter “kind of brought us back 30 years to some of the enjoyable times we had as classmates. It was just really touching.”

Gaveras, who sometimes refers his clients’ pets for treatment at SVM, has given scholarship gifts in memory of these pets, and fund donors can also give in honor of people. “I thought that was a nice touch,” he says.

“We had a unique relationship with the school as a class,” Gaveras adds, noting that, as the first students, they were able to provide considerable input and help shape the program. “As a result, a lot of us have maintained relationships with the school, and we appreciate being able to give back to a profession that has given so much to us.”

This wasn’t the first time that Poff has given back. Because he was a married father of two when he attended the UW’s veterinary school, he knew how hard it was to complete coursework while working — which he felt compelled to do in order to provide health insurance for his family. So, several years ago, he and his wife started a scholarship for students in similar circumstances. But Poff, who has spent his career in medical-device development, says, “I wanted to try to figure out how to do more — and the idea of a doing a class scholarship popped into my head.”

His veterinary school education, he says, “changed not just my life — it changed a bunch of people’s lives. Let’s pay that forward.”

Bradie Ewing ’12 is among more than 60 former walk-ons who have pledged some $700,000 to support this brotherhood of Badger alumni. David Stlukka/UW Athletics

Wisconsin football is known for having a strong walk-on program that is integral to its success, and now this brotherhood of Badger alumni have united to support students who are following in their footsteps.

Scott Young ’95, who walked on as an outside linebacker for the Badgers from 1991 to 1995, called on his fellow former walk-ons to provide funds to help players who don’t benefit from athletic scholarships. Bobby Adamov ’99, Steve Baffico ’96, Chris Maragos ’10, Bradie Ewing ’12, Matt Davenport ’99, Joe Schobert ’16, and Mark Tauscher ’99, MS’03 were some of the first to jump on board, and the fund grew quickly, aided by the Wisconsin Foundation and Alumni Association’s own David Gilreath ’21, a former Badger football standout who went on to play in the NFL.

Tauscher says the donors were motivated by the powerful impact that their UW–Madison experience had on both their on- and off-the-field success. “I think we all just took a ton of pride in the fact that we were able to make a difference on the football team and moving forward,” he says. “What was awesome was that so many guys were excited about doing something to give back to the university in a way that was really personal to them.”

More than 60 former walk-ons — now joined by former scholarship players — have pledged some $700,000 to support non-scholarship players, many of whom find remarkable success on the field. (See “Walk-Ons: Despite the Odds,” from the Fall 2015 On Wisconsin.)

Young, who is now senior vice president–wealth management for UBS Financial Services in Greenwood Village, Colorado, says that Wisconsin is the only NCAA football program in the country with a scholarship organized by former players for the benefit of current walk-ons. Gifts have come in from gridiron athletes who attended over the past 40-plus years.

The walk-ons fund was recently merged with another scholarship fund created in honor of the late Father Mike Burke, who served as the team’s chaplain for some 30 years. Burke “was so meaningful to all of us,” says Young. “He was the officiant for more than 100 players’ weddings [during his tenure]. We absolutely love Father Mike.” The merging of the two funds into one, now called The Walk-On Scholarship in Honor of Fr. Mike Burke, has also prompted gifts from many former scholarship players.

The donors hope to create a perpetually endowed scholarship to provide a full ride for one deserving walk-on player each year. “It’s going to change a kid’s life,” says Young. Coach Paul Chryst ’88 will announce the winner at a football practice, and Young hopes to have many donors present when a student “who will be so much like us” learns the good news. “The room is going to explode when that kid gets that scholarship,” he says. “This is paying it forward and giving back.”

Help is here, courtesy of some of UW–Madison’s newest faculty members. As part of their introduction to campus, we asked them: “What’s something interesting about your area of expertise you can share that will make us sound smarter at parties?”

Whether you use the information to impress your friends or just learn something interesting for yourself, consider this a bit of the Wisconsin Idea you can bring to your next social gathering.

Allergies Aren’t Immutable

Often, people think that allergies are predictable, but they can change and evolve over time. You might start out with an allergy to one particular food, like a type of nut, then later on find out that you’re also allergic to other nuts or foods. Reactions can change and evolve pretty dramatically, too, and can become more or less severe over time.

— Anne Ersig, assistant professor, nursing

The Mysteries of Dark Matter

We know very little about the universe that we live in. The observable part of the universe is only about 4 percent. The other 96 percent of it is made of what is called dark matter and dark energy. Many experiments all over the world, including the experiment that I work on at the Large Hadron Collider, are trying to figure out what this overwhelming majority of the universe is made of.

— Tulika Bose, professor, physics

A Moo Point

Cows spend several hours a day ruminating — that is, chewing. The most interesting thing about this process is that ruminants’ brain waves resemble humans’ brain waves while sleeping.

— Luiz Ferraretto MS’11, PhD’15, assistant professor, dairy science; ruminant nutrition specialist, Division of Extension

He Likes It! He Likes It!

Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote the Spanish lyrics for the most recent revival of West Side Story. He met composer Stephen Sondheim when he worked on that project, and Sondheim asked him what he was going to do after his hit musical In the Heights. Miranda said he was thinking about a musical based on the life of Alexander Hamilton and Miranda said Sondheim threw back his head and said, “That’s a fantastic idea.” That’s what kept Miranda going during the writing of Hamilton when he’d have trouble with something. He knew he was on the right track if Sondheim liked the idea.

— Margaret Butler, associate professor, musicology

Bad Boarding Practice

Many airlines split the passengers into several groups during the boarding. Yet mathematical results indicate that this is actually bad and only slows down the boarding process.

—Vadim Gorin, associate professor, mathematics

Devoted Dads

The idea that Black fathers are generally uninvolved and disinterested in the lives of their children is a cruel fabrication and a fallacy. The research indicates that not only are Black fathers intimately involved and interested in the lives of their children, but that Black fathers who do not share residence with their children are more involved than any of their ethnic counterparts.

— Alvin Thomas, assistant professor, human development and family studies

Park and Bark

The trend in opera today eschews the old style, in which singers essentially stood, sang, and made rather meaningless arm gestures.That old-school practice is commonly known in operatic circles as “park and bark.”

— David Ronis, associate professor, music

Capitol Cause

I always love to tell people about the Capitol Crawl, which was an important moment in disability history. Over 1,000 people marched to the steps of the U.S. Capitol to protest for disability rights and the eventual passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990. The youngest was an eight-year-old girl, Jennifer Keelan, who got out of her wheelchair and pulled herself up the Capitol steps. You can learn more about it in the movie Crip Camp, which is available on Netflix.

— Carlyn Mueller, assistant professor, rehabilitation psychology and special education

No Accounting for Accounting

To many people’s surprise, there are no right answers in accounting. The judgments and estimates underlying the preparation of financial reports are numerous and can lead to very interesting incentives and a high degree of second-guessing that makes accounting much more a social science than a hard science.

— Tom Linsmeier MBA’80, PhD’85, Thomas Ragatz Accounting and Law Distinguished Chair

Combating Climate Change

The idea of carbon footprints — a process for estimating a person’s individual contribution to climate change — was popularized by the fossil fuel company BP. The problem is that it focuses attention on individual rather than structural change.

— Morgan Edwards, assistant professor, La Follette School of Public Affairs

Science Nonfiction

Unlike humans who can breathe only oxygen (a gas), many microbes can breathe solid compounds.

— Karthik Anantharaman, assistant professor, bacteriology

So Fries are Healthy?

Potato is rich in vitamin C, a powerful antioxidant that can help the human body form and maintain bones, blood vessels, and skin. A five-ounce potato will supply nearly 50 percent of an average adult’s daily requirement for vitamin C.

Yi Wang PhD’12, assistant professor, horticulture; Division of Extension specialist

Mendota Has a Meltdown

Lake Mendota is one of the most studied lakes in the world. For instance, we have more than 150 years of lake-ice data. In the 1850s, Lake Mendota averaged about 120 days a year with lake ice. Recently it has been closer to 80 days, and 2015–16 and 2016–17 had only 62 and 65 days [with lake ice].

— Hilary Dugan, assistant professor, integrative biology

The Martian Invasion

Contrary to popular belief, the 1938 War of the Worlds radio play didn’t cause widespread hysteria. There were some people who misinterpreted the broadcast as a news report about a real Martian invasion, but most of them simply called either the police or their local news outlets to determine the veracity of the broadcast. So while the image of people panicking in the streets and weeping in churches is certainly more entertaining, the reality is that the impact of the incident was largely exaggerated.

— Kate Christy, assistant professor, journalism and mass communication

The Dirt on Dirt

Soil is alive! It’s estimated that 20,000 pounds of living matter exists in the top six inches of an acre of soil. Also, one tablespoon of soil harbors more organisms than there are people on Earth.

— Zac Freedman, assistant professor, soil science, and O. N. Allen Professor of Soil Microbiology

Myths and Misconceptions

In contrast to common knowledge about what an American family looks like, it was only for a short period of time that the American family was composed of a breadwinner, a nonemployed mother, and two children.

— Eunsil Oh, assistant professor, sociology

Musical Notes

What we know as the banjo in the United States is likely a modified version of the ngoni, a string instrument originally from West Africa, which enslaved individuals brought from Africa. You can learn more about the history of the African origins of the banjo in Béla Fleck’s 2008 documentary Throw Down Your Heart.

 — Jacqueline-Bethel Tchouta Mougoué, assistant professor, African cultural studies

Early Influences Rule

Often people think of infancy and toddlerhood as a time when children are unaware of many things happening around them and assume that children will not be deeply impacted by stressors that the family is facing. In fact, early exposures, experiences, and relationships provide the foundations for the child’s developmental trajectory and relational capacities across the life course.

— Tova Walsh, assistant professor, social work

Baby Bookworms

Usually, individuals consider that youngsters [are first taught reading and writing] in early elementary school. However, younger youngsters interact with literacy from their very first weeks and months on this planet! We are able to see emergent literacy practices in their first turns of the pages of a board book, their first phrases, and their — deeply significant — first scribbles on a page.

— Emily Machado, assistant professor, early childhood education

Historic View

In nighttime photographs of Berlin from the International Space Station, the city’s Cold War partition is still visible. West Berlin uses environmentally friendly fluorescent streetlights that give off a white glow, while East Berlin uses older, sodium-vapor lamps that glow orange. It’s a striking reminder of how, 30 years after the end of the Cold War, legacies of that division continue to impact life in the city — and in Germany and Europe more broadly.

— Brandon Bloch, assistant professor, history

High on Health

Cannabis has been used for healing purposes since at least 1500 BC.

— Natalie Schmitz, assistant professor, pharmacy practice

And You Thought 50 Was Old

The earth is about 4.56 billion years old. The oldest mineral fragments that we have preserved from the early earth are up to 4.37 billion years old, and the oldest continental crust that is still intact and for which the age is undisputed is about 4 billion years old. There’s a lot of missing history in the earliest part of the terrestrial rock record, but there are several people at UW–Madison trying to parse out what we can from the little amount of material we have.

— Annie Bauer, assistant professor, geoscience

How Do You Like Them Cranberries?

Wisconsin is the leading producer of cranberries in the U.S.! Cranberries do not grow in water, despite that popular belief. They grow in sandy marshes, and when they are ready for harvest the marshes are flooded and the cranberries float to the top.

— Leslie Holland, assistant professor, plant pathology; fruit crop pathology specialist, Division of Extension

Warfarin’s Namesake

A common medication to prevent strokes is named after the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation: warfarin.

— Amanda Margolis, assistant professor, pharmacy practice

Beauty of Language

Ojibwe, like perhaps all of Wisconsin’s Native languages, is extraordinarily complex and beautiful. Imagine any given verb having several thousand unique forms and expressions. Indigenous languages are also incredibly adaptive. Not only do they give brilliant explanation to the many place names on Wisconsin maps and roads, but they can quite exactly describe and name anything in the modern world.

—Brian McInnes, associate professor, civil society and community studies

Learning Curve

Autism is a relatively new diagnosis. Most people do not know that the first individual diagnosed with it is currently in his 80s. Because the first people diagnosed with autism have only recently reached old age, we do not know much about what the normal life course looks like for them.

— Lauren Bishop-Fitzpatrick, assistant professor, social work; investigator, Waisman Center

Baraka’s organization has distributed 200 board games to the Kyangwali Refugee Settlement. Joel Baraka

Joel Baraka x’22 grew up in the Kyangwali Refugee Settlement in Uganda after his family fled civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo when he was one year old. Although he’s been fortunate enough to attend UW–Madison on a King-Morgridge scholarship, finding a way to help other children growing up in the camp was never far from his mind.

The civil and environmental engineering major decided the best way to do that was by creating a board game to make learning fun. His game 5 STA-Z covers Uganda’s core subjects of math, social science, science, and English and is designed for groups of five. Because the crowded camp can lead to classes of up to 150 students, using a game that students can play in small groups provides a practical solution.

“What excites me about this is the idea that children can learn from one another,” Baraka says. “As they are playing the game, they are learning and becoming stars while mastering the content. When you look at the name, it’s five stars, but it’s spelled with ‘A-Z’ because I wanted to create a game that covered the full curriculum of Uganda.”

Baraka enlisted the help of his friend and fellow engineering major Anson Liow ’21, an international student from Malaysia, to design the game’s packaging. “Joel showed me how much of an impact a simple idea and hard work can make,” says Liow. The duo has now partnered to improve the game and reach more children across Uganda.

Since raising more than $12,000 from a GoFundMe page, Baraka’s organization, My Home Stars, has distributed 200 games to the Kyangwali Refugee Settlement. Baraka hopes to continue growing the initiative.

“Our goal is to develop a model that works in Uganda which we [can] replicate and spread across the African continent,” he says.

She’s an outsider by any measure — a younger political scientist at UW–Madison hoping to shoot the breeze with a klatch of older rural men. She disarms their skepticism with her familiar Wisconsin accent and knowledge of the local dice game.

Cramer is here to listen as they discuss their political views. One of the first topics is her employer, the state’s flagship university.

“The ones who end up going to the UW, going to the top-tier schools outside the state, usually have parents who [are] educated and know what the game is to be played. … Their parents are probably graduates and have probably really nice jobs,” says one of the men, with the others nodding. “These are poor people up here.”

From 2007 to 2012, as Cramer met regularly with this group and 26 others around the state, she came to recognize the resentment in that response. Rural distrust of urbanites and so-called elites bled beyond higher education into nearly every issue. As one of the dice players concisely put it: “I think you’ve forgotten rural America.”

And in 2016, election polls did.

Wisconsin, which had voted for a Democrat for president every election since 1988, swung for Republican nominee Donald Trump in 2016 — to the shock of pollsters, pundits, and the public alike. The main reason? Rural voters carried the state for Trump by a 27-point margin, according to exit polls. Eight years prior, Obama had won them over by nearly 10 points.

Cramer’s unconventional fieldwork informed The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker, which she published in March 2016. Just months before the election, Cramer’s book diagnosed precisely what polling in key swing states would miss come November — a rural rebuke of the status quo.

Cramer diagnosed what polling in key swing states missed in 2016: a rural rebuke of the status quo. Jeff Miller

“Tapping into emotion is not about an issue or even about partisanship. It’s about people’s sense of who they are in the world,” Cramer says. “I think it came out of the blue to pollsters because they weren’t necessarily asking about these latent feelings — people’s sense of distribution of resources, or respect, or shared values.”

As the polling industry applies lessons from 2016 and looks to regain public trust, UW–Madison is diving directly into the discussion. Earlier this year, the Elections Research Center launched a battleground poll in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, hoping to identify and quantify trends like the one Cramer discovered.

At stake? An essential tool of democracy.

What Went Wrong in 2016?

On the night of the 2016 election, as surprise results rolled in, the right delighted in what it saw as a massive failure by the polling establishment. The left felt betrayed by it. But both sides have appeared united in their distrust of polling since.

“No one anticipated that 2016 would be so consequential for the polling field,” says Courtney Kennedy, director of survey research at the Pew Research Center.

Sensing a pivotal moment for the industry, the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) asked a national committee of pollsters to sift through the data and figure out what went wrong. Chaired by Kennedy, the committee began with a controversial question: did the polls really fail?

The answer is complicated.

Collectively, national polls accurately estimated the popular vote. They showed Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton with a three-point lead, and she won it by two points — one of the most precise margins since the advent of modern presidential polling.

Likewise, most state-level polls correctly indicated a competitive race for Electoral College delegates, which would actually determine the outcome. Before the election, RealClearPolitics averaged state polling and reported a nearly even count of delegates. “The polls on average indicated that Trump was one state away from winning the election,” stated the postmortem report that AAPOR published in 2017.

What some polls missed was the increase in support for Trump in northern swing states, where he completed an unlikely sweep of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.

The final Marquette University Law Poll found 46 percent support for Clinton and 40 percent for Trump among likely voters in Wisconsin. Polls told a similar tale in Michigan and Pennsylvania. Polling aggregators and political pundits put the likelihood of a Clinton victory between 70 and 99 percent, viewing those three states as part of her “Blue Wall” of support. Fewer than 80,000 voters combined — less than one percent in each of those states — toppled it.

“Most of the models underestimated the extent to which polling errors were correlated from state to state,” wrote Nate Silver, founder of the polling aggregator website FiveThirtyEight, following the election. “If Clinton were going to underperform her polls in Pennsylvania, for instance, she was also likely to do so in demographically similar states such as Wisconsin and Michigan.” The AAPOR committee chased every popular theory for what went wrong with polling in those states — including the “shy Trump voter” effect, the belief that some of his voters were reluctant to reveal their intention. For that one, it found no significant evidence.

What the committee did find was an unprecedented change in voter preference late in the campaign. Roughly 15 percent of voters in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania waited to make a decision until the final week of the race, when most polls were no longer actively in the field.

“Normally, those late deciders aren’t much of a factor,” Kennedy says. “Historically, they break about evenly between the two major-party candidates, so it kind of washes out. In 2016, in those battleground states, they broke for Trump by wide margins — 15 to 20 percent.”

Such a divergence would have been difficult for pollsters to anticipate, but the committee did identify a significant failing. Many polls, especially at the state level, neglected to adjust for an overrepresentation of college graduates in their samples. And those voters turned out strongly for Clinton.

“People with higher levels of formal education tend to be more likely to take polls,” Kennedy says. “And we’ve known this, frankly, for a long time.”

In elections past, polls could get away with not weighting for education, assuming they accurately adjusted for more predictive demographics like gender, age, and race. But that’s because Democrats successfully courted some white working-class voters. Not long ago, especially among union workers, they were a key constituency of the Democratic base. “And in 2016, Trump turned that on its head,” Kennedy says.

In a way, election polling’s reckoning was inevitable. Local news organizations have historically led or cosponsored polling efforts. And the quantity and quality of state-level polling has followed the trajectory of declining media budgets.

“It is a persistent frustration within polling and the larger survey research community that the profession is judged based on how these often-underbudgeted state polls perform relative to the election outcome,” the AAPOR report concluded. “The industry cannot realistically change how it is judged, but it can make an improvement to the polling landscape.”

And UW–Madison answered the call.

The Battleground Poll

“Wisconsin is the quintessential battleground state,” says Barry Burden, director of the UW’s Elections Research Center and professor of political science. “Almost magically, the forces that would help Republicans and the forces that would help Democrats seem to be in a perpetual balance.”

Most notably, while urban areas like Madison and Milwaukee are turning out strongly for Democrats, rural voters in the northern and western parts of the state are gravitating to Republicans.

And yet, aside from the highly regarded Marquette poll, the state lacks consistent public-opinion surveys to capture such trends.

UW–Madison was uniquely positioned to fill this polling gap. In 2015, the Department of Political Science established the Elections Research Center to centralize the research of more than a dozen faculty members across disciplines.

Many of the center’s experts have earned national reputations, appearing regularly in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, PolitiFact, and other media. Burden alone fields as many as 10 requests from journalists per day, with recent topics ranging from caucus-reporting technology, to diversity on the presidential ticket, to mail-in voting, to the electoral consequences of a pandemic.

The experts are called to testify in court and legislative bodies about their research. The Washington State Senate, for instance, asked Burden to share his findings on the effects of same-day voter registration, which the center had studied in Wisconsin.

To reach the broader public, they post to Twitter during debates, election nights, and other major political events. “[The work] requires a level of vigilance to keep up with current events,” Burden says. “One of the things my colleagues and I can offer is putting these events in context of research and broader patterns.”

The Elections Research Center partners with the data company YouGov and media entities to conduct public-opinion surveys. One survey made headlines during the 2018 Senate hearing on sexual assault allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. UW researchers recycled questions from a survey in 1991, when Justice Clarence Thomas faced sexual-misconduct allegations. They found almost no movement in public opinion on whether the respective nominations should go through if the allegations were true, with around 70 percent of respondents in both surveys saying it should not. (However, respondents in 2018 indicated they were much more likely to vote against a senator if he or she supported the nominee.)

Encouraged by past efforts, the center launched the 2020 battleground poll, immediately contributing to the political discussion. Its first poll results in February dispelled a pervasive cable-news narrative. Throughout the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, the networks used exit-polling data to demonstrate that the top motivation for Democratic voters was “electability” — whoever had the best chance to beat Trump.

Burden says surveys can shed light on an election beyond the question of who voted for whom. Jeff Miller

But Burden wondered whether that was the result of Democratic voters being faced with a false dichotomy: do you care about the issues or beating Trump? When the UW’s poll offered more options to respondents, it found that 37 percent predominantly supported a primary candidate because of key issues, 22 percent because of his or her chances to beat Trump, and 20 percent because he or she was the most qualified to be president.

And to no one’s surprise: the poll also showed a close race between Trump and several of the then–Democratic candidates in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. The center plans to conduct several more surveys before November’s election.

The battleground poll continues a legacy of elections research at the university, though conditions have vastly changed over the past two decades.

The Landline Era

From 1998 to 2008, UW political scientists ran the Wisconsin Advertising Project, which analyzed presidential and statewide campaign ads aired on TV in more than 200 media markets. It pulled back the curtain on how candidates communicated with voters.

Around the same time, the UW Survey Center administered the Badger Poll to measure statewide public opinion. Cramer, who’s now an affiliate of the Elections Research Center, served as the faculty director of the Badger Poll. She started to notice overlapping trends in polling results and her fieldwork. “Many people thought that rural areas of the state didn’t get their fair share of state taxpayer dollars,” she says.

The Badger Poll’s methodology was to sample some 500 Wisconsin residents by randomly selecting households with active landlines. It mailed notices to households, redialed numbers as many as 10 times, and intensively trained interviewers to keep potential respondents on the line. Those efforts helped the Badger Poll, which ran 32 surveys between 2002 and 2011, regularly achieve a response rate of roughly 40 percent.

Now, such a response is a fantasy. If you’re willing to answer a call from an unknown number, you’re part of the 1 to 2 percent response rate that even high-quality phone surveys strive for today.

For as long as polling has existed, technology has uprooted methodology. And with the public becoming more difficult — and costly — to reach, pollsters are getting creative. The UW’s polling partner, YouGov, is an entirely online operation that’s finding ways to forgo representative sampling without sacrificing quality.

The Brave New World of Polling

By 1936, the Literary Digest had accurately predicted the winner of every presidential election of the past 20 years. That year, it embarked on one of the most ambitious polling operations of all time, mailing out mock ballots to 10 million people.

“When the last figure has been totted and checked, if past experience is a criterion, the country will know within a fraction of 1 percent the actual popular vote,” the Digest declared.

The magazine’s straw poll predicted that Franklin D. Roosevelt would lose in a landslide to Alf Landon and win just 43 percent of the vote. He won 61 percent.

That cataclysmic error — the result of selection bias with a disproportionately affluent mailing list as well as a high rate of nonresponses — ushered in the modern era of scientific public-opinion polling. George Gallup and Elmo Roper, with much smaller but more representative samples, both predicted Roosevelt’s reelection and went on to found polling enterprises that remain active today. (The Digest folded 18 months later.) For some 50 years, representative sampling easily differentiated the good polls from the bad. But as communications technology has evolved, the craft of high-quality polling has become much more complex. Whenever a new, pricier technology emerges — landlines, cellphones, the internet — polling must adapt to it slowly or risk skewed samples because of lack of widespread access. The internet has posed another problem: while pollsters can access lists of every mailing address or phone number, there’s no master list of emails, making it impossible to recruit a representative sample digitally.

The UW’s polling uses an opt-in panel of people whom YouGov has recruited online and compensated for participation in other surveys (such as product testing for companies). While it’s not representative sampling, YouGov collects a wide range of personal information from its participants, which it uses to accurately weight the sample to the larger population. YouGov’s polls have called nearly 90 percent of recent political races correctly, according to FiveThirtyEight.

YouGov has learned to innovatively adjust for variables beyond demographics, including political ideology, volunteerism, and news consumption. Such measures have helped it address polling’s familiar foe: the overrepresentation of people with college degrees.

“This is not a fly-by-night internet operation,” Burden says. “They are staffed by a lot of academics and political scientists who understand the scientific goals we have.”

High-quality polls seem to be navigating this new landscape effectively. The 2017–19 election cycle was one of the most accurate on record for polling, according to FiveThirtyEight, with the lowest average error margins since 2003–04.

So where does that leave us for 2020?

Trust Polling to Do What?

As I talked to the experts in this story, I started with the same question: “Why is polling important?”

In March, I read Jill Lepore’s New Yorker article “The Problems Inherent in Political Polling.” She argued that polling, like endeavoring to gauge public opinion via social media, is flawed. “Democracy requires participation, deliberation, representation, and leadership — the actual things, not their simulation,” she wrote.

I, too, had become a skeptic.

But the experts reminded me that — beyond the horse-race polling numbers that tend to populate the headlines — collecting public opinion can serve a critical function of democracy.

“If you think about a society where there’s no polling, the leader of that country can just go out and say, ‘Well, I know the public feels this way,’ ” Kennedy says. “Contrast that with a society where there are a lot of independent pollsters and all of their data converge, so that, ‘Oh, actually, the public has this other attitude.’ It provides a reality check for people in office.”

According to Burden, surveys can shed light on an election beyond the question of who voted for whom. “Public opinion polling asks voters directly, ‘What are you thinking? What matters to you? What are your positions on the issues? What would you like to see government do? What is your ideal vision of society?’ ”

I had also lost sight of the golden rule of polling: that the results represent a snapshot in time, not a prediction. For pollsters, it’s a clichéd disclaimer. But for a public and media eager to speculate on who will win, misinterpreting polls as predictions can lead to false expectations and big surprises.

Through high-quality polling, insightful public-opinion analysis, and research-based commentary, UW experts are demonstrating a responsible way forward for our political dialogue. They’re uncovering how voters feel, not projecting what they will do. Cramer discovered rural resentment the old-fashioned way: “polling by walking around.”

As for the question everyone is asking — “Should I trust the polls after 2016?” — I saved that one for last.

“My response is, ‘Trust polling to do what?’ ” Kennedy says. “Are you asking me if you can trust polling to call the winner in a close election? I would say no. It’s not up to that task. But if the question is, ‘Can I trust polling to tell me how the public feels about Donald Trump? About [House Speaker] Nancy Pelosi? About health care? About the response to the COVID-19 pandemic?’

“Yes, polling is absolutely up to that challenge.”

Kessenich has pledged an estate gift of $1 million to need-based scholarships for students in mathematics, computer science, and data science. Frank Woodbery

The next time you take vacation photos on your phone or store homework on a flash drive, you can thank Jeff Kessenich ’83.

His name is on 11 patents issued for the memory chips that improve storage reliability in smartphones, digital cameras, and other devices. Kessenich used his UW degree in Applied Mathematics, Engineering, and Physics to pursue a career in the semiconductor industry, eventually retiring from Micron Technology.

“I feel very fortunate to have had the opportunity to collaborate on projects with so many intelligent and incredibly talented individuals,” he says. “Often I felt like we were writing a new page in the textbooks every week.”

Kessenich is now on a mission to help today’s students launch their own careers in technology. He has pledged an estate gift of $1 million to need-based scholarships for students in mathematics, computer science, and data science. Thanks to the Patterson Match, a generous gift from James Patterson and Susan Patterson ’79, MFA’82 that underwrites student support, an endowed scholarship was created in Kessenich’s honor.

After he retired, the Vancouver, Washington, resident taught briefly at a community college. He came away from the experience struck by how hard it was for many students to pay for an education. “If students really want to go to college, I don’t want them dissuaded by the fear of taking on a large amount of student loan debt,” he says. “I feel good doing something about that.”

Kessenich says he could have directed his gift to a number of universities, “but I have a soft spot for Wisconsin, and I value the education I got there.”

Kessenich’s desire to give back extends to numerous initiatives in his local community. He tutors disadvantaged high school students in math. A master gardener, he’s a neighborhood tree steward and also a “stream steward.” Kessenich has received an award for his work in tree planting and natural area restoration, as well as for volunteering at a cat shelter.

When we spoke with Kessenich, he was wearing a UW T-shirt because the hockey team was playing that day. “I’m always supporting my Badgers,” he says.

She was a C student living on the north side of Chicago and didn’t feel particularly connected to her education. A first-generation Vietnamese American and daughter of refugees, she found solace in her notebook. Then, one day, an English teacher caught her writing poems underneath her desk.

“[The teacher] invited me to come perform at an open-mic event,” she says. “It was [at the event] that I started to realize that, ‘Wow, I can write these poems; I do have potential.’ College became an option to me at that point because, for the first time, I saw myself as a scholar and finally felt as if I had found community with people who understood me.”

And it was poetry and spoken word that brought Truong-Muñoz to the UW in 2007, after she was recruited as one of the inaugural members of UW–Madison’s First Wave hip-hop scholarship program.

The four-year, full-tuition scholarship program was the first of its type in the nation. Housed within the UW’s Office of Multicultural Arts Initiatives, it’s given students — who specialize in areas such as spoken word, poetry, rap, graffiti, and break dancing — opportunities to hone their crafts and perform together around the world. It recruits a cohort of students that begins classes together the summer prior to freshman year and then continues through the university as a group. The program, which requires that its students are first accepted into UW–Madison, has seen nearly 100 of its members graduate with bachelor’s degrees.

More than a decade since the first wave of First Wave participants arrived, they still carry a sense of community with them. It was the key to surviving — and thriving — in a campus environment that initially felt completely unfamiliar to many of them. With help from their friends and support from their program, they set off in a variety of directions — some of them in ways they never could have predicted.

The Vision That Started It All

Willie Ney MA’93, MA’94 had the idea for a hip-hop program at the UW in the mid-2000s. As First Wave’s founding executive director, he saw potential for a pipeline that recruits students with creative-writing talent in the same way the university recruits athletes. Ney, who at the time was an assistant director for the UW’s Latin American, Caribbean, and Iberian Studies Program, says creating such a pipeline was his “passion project” — not falling under his assigned duties — until he was eventually named the program’s leader.

“Obviously the lack of diversity is a huge issue at the university, but it’s beyond just the numbers of bringing in more students of color,” says Ney, who retired as the program’s executive director in 2017. “We’re not just bringing in students who are diverse; we’re bringing in students who are amazingly talented artistically, academically, and in terms of their activism.”

Focused on empowering their communities, the students go on to use their UW experiences to improve lives after graduation.

“When you think about the power of that group, just the talent, the impact is so much more exponential than what you’d ever think about. You’re not just recruiting one student at a time, you’re bringing in a whole group,” Ney adds, noting that the impact is multiplied with each new cohort. “They’re doing unbelievable things, and they have a UW–Madison degree behind them — which really helps.”

A Ready-Made Support System

When choosing where to go to college, Truong-Muñoz didn’t want to be just another student. First Wave, she felt, offered her the same community and support that she had through poetry slam competitions in high school.

“I’m Vietnamese American and first in my family to go to college, and [UW–Madison] wouldn’t have been possible if it wasn’t for [the First Wave community].”

Fellow cohort member Adam Levin ’12 also found the First Wave community one of the most meaningful parts of his UW experience.

“There was this huge culture shock [upon arriving on campus], and I think First Wave was really important,” he says. “Whenever we were dealing with this kind of culture shock, where suddenly we are on this campus that is predominantly white, it felt like we had this ready-made support system.”

Levin attended Oak Park (Illinois) and River Forest High School (which has a 46 percent minority enrollment rate, compared to the UW’s nearly 16 percent, according to U.S. News & World Report and Data USA, respectively). He learned of First Wave through the school’s spoken-word program, and he, like many cohort members, was recruited through First Wave’s former program director, Josh Healey ’05. Prior to that, Levin hadn’t considered attending UW–Madison. Upon his arrival, however, he felt reassured in his decision, knowing he was part of a group with shared interests — something he wasn’t sure he’d find again after high school.

While a teenager in Boston, Sofía Snow ’11 hadn’t given college much thought. She was a leader in strengthening her community’s youth poetry presence and even earned a Massachusetts hip-hop award for spoken-word artist of the year. To her surprise, the award led to a four-page cover profile in the Boston Globe. She was 17 years old.

Snow then heard from Ney, who was looking to recruit her to First Wave’s inaugural cohort. Despite some initial hesitation, Snow’s mother — who immigrated to the U.S. from Venezuela for both her and her daughter’s education — told Snow that if she didn’t leave Boston, Snow would never have time for herself. “I was just so overcommitted in the city that it was hard for me to focus on school,” Snow says.

First Wave’s sense of community played a role in Snow’s decision to pursue the program. “Willie said, ‘There’s going to be young people just like you from all over the country. … You’re going to be able to meet people from different places.’ That, to me, was more interesting than anything else.”

Cohort member Danez Smith ’12 explains that Madison was initially a difficult place to navigate. Being the only student of color in a hundred-person lecture hall and not feeling represented in the city’s culture became taxing, Smith says. A Saint Paul, Minnesota, native, Smith considered leaving campus.

“I don’t necessarily have the fondest memories of Madison as a place, but I have really fond memories of the people here,” Smith says. “I think there are communities of color and queer folks and just good folks — regardless of identity — in the university and in the greater Madison area that really helped me, but I think Madison has a very sort of liberal dream about itself that doesn’t always translate as true for a lot of people of color here.”

Smith, who uses the pronoun they, decided to attend UW–Madison because of First Wave. They note that professors such as First Wave’s former artistic director Chris Walker and former faculty director Amaud Johnson transformed both their life and UW experience, teaching them to see the world in a more expansive way and ask better questions of it.

For Krystal Gartley ’11, MSW’19, First Wave offered a place of belonging. The cohort’s members may not have felt understood by their family and friends at home, but they connected with each other over a shared love of various art forms.

Gartley was already a musician, and she learned how much she enjoyed performing poetry and spoken word during her senior year of high school. With the support of her teachers, she decided to pursue the program.

“I had a pretty tough upbringing, and writing was my way of expressing my emotions,” Gartley says. “I thought that [First Wave] would be an opportunity to meet other people who shared a similar craft, and I wanted that sense of family on campus.”

First Wave also helped students address some of the misunderstandings surrounding racial diversity on campus, says cohort member Jair Alvarez ’11, JD’14. “[Attending] one First Wave show can change that,” he says.

Having moved to the Madison area from Puerto Rico at age 11, Alvarez dreamed of going to the UW. His mother had attended, but he wasn’t sure how he could afford it — his family faced financial hardship and had been homeless for three months when he was 17. “My college apps were done on my friend’s computer, because I didn’t have one,” he says. Once recruited into the program, he knew he’d be able to attend the UW. Alvarez — a community activist while in high school at Madison West — was also grateful to have an outlet to work on his creative projects.

But being a part of the program’s first cohort also came with challenges, Levin says. Cohort members sometimes felt pressure to prove that the program was worthy of support.

“I knew that there was a lot riding on how well we did in class,” Levin says. “It really felt like we were a part of something that was larger than ourselves, and we were laying the groundwork for something that could be really important to the University of Wisconsin.”

Clockwise from top right: Adam Levin, Allen Arango, Krystal Gartley, Sofía Snow, Kimanh Truong-Muñoz, Cecilia León, Dominique Chestand, Danez Smith, Blaire White, Ben Young, Alida Cardós Whaley. Andy Manis

A Lasting Impact

With the help of her First Wave experiences, Truong-Muñoz — now an educator in California — has come full circle.

“It was when a teacher saw my potential that I actually rose to the occasion,” she says. Now, after serving as a high school teacher and an assistant principal, and earning her master’s degree, Truong-Muñoz directs a branch of a program that helps prepare underrepresented high school students of color for college and encourages them to pursue their passions.

Truong-Muñoz says that the program, SMASH (formerly Summer Math and Science Honors Academy), exists to “smash” barriers for underrepresented students interested in pursuing STEM careers. She utilizes First Wave’s three areas of focus — arts, academics, and activism — as a framework for her work, ensuring students understand the power of their stories and voices. She also incorporates hip-hop in the program’s curriculum, and, occasionally, students will see her rap or perform a poem.

“I’m constantly carrying my First Wave experience into everything I do,” she says.

Similarly, Levin is a full-time teacher in Waukegan, Illinois. Prior to beginning his student teaching, he was involved in the spoken-word program he participated in as a high school student, and he also has cofounded a rap workshop in Chicago.

Meanwhile, Smith is a touring poet who has earned the Forward Prize for Best Collection and the Midwest Booksellers Choice Award, along with being a finalist for a 2017 National Book Award. As a person who travels frequently, Smith says their job necessitates carrying out the Wisconsin Idea.

“I take myself and everything I’ve learned [at the UW], and everything I’ve learned through the world, with me and really try to expand my ideas. … I try to be as open and giving in each of these spaces that I enter as possible,” says Smith, who plans to release a third poetry collection next year.

Before returning to school for her master’s degree in social work, Gartley cofounded and codirected an a cappella group and worked in the Madison Metropolitan School District.

“I feel that being in First Wave really gave me this level of confidence that I didn’t recognize until later in life,” she says. “Developing and cofounding an a cappella group was, I feel in part, stemming from that confidence that I gained while in First Wave.”

Gartley is now pursuing a path to earn her doctorate in neuroscience. She plans to study the relationship between biology and psychology — specifically, the impact of trauma on the brain and body.

Alvarez, who knew he wanted to attend law school after seeing police harassment during his childhood, now leads his own practice as a business and criminal attorney in Madison. He also has served as a liaison for the Wisconsin Hispanic Lawyers Association, as vice chair of the Latino Chamber of Commerce of Dane County, and on the community advisory board for the Overture Center.

“Because of First Wave, I am not afraid of the court at all. I can walk into the court, give a speech, and get yelled at by the judge, and I’m not embarrassed — I don’t get stage fright,” Alvarez says.

Snow, who originally hadn’t envisioned herself in college, graduated from the UW with advanced standing in her social-work degree. Following a few years as First Wave’s education and outreach coordinator, she transitioned to Urban Word NYC, a youth literary arts organization in New York. There she climbed to the role of executive director, where she oversaw the organization’s operations and enjoyed providing students with a space for development so they could access universities such as the UW. Snow was also part of the Bars Workshop, a theater and verse program cofounded by former First Wave creative director Rafael Casal x’10 and original Hamilton cast member Daveed Diggs.

“[First Wave] changed the trajectory of my life, and I really can’t emphasize that enough, how much it’s meant to me,” Snow says. “First Wave taught me what it means to be in community, what it means to collaborate. I owe all of my leadership skills and love for the people, and this work, directly back to this community of folks.”

Summer on campus has always been swell, boasting one-of-a-kind study spots like the Memorial Union Terrace and Picnic Point. But over the last four years, the university has transformed the summer academic experience to better help students advance their degrees and prepare for their careers. If summer term 2019 is any indication, the plan is working. The UW launched the new era by surveying students about what they need and want from summer study. In 2016, summer term added more high-demand courses, more hands-on experiences, and more online courses to provide flexibility for busy schedules. To ensure that a wide range of students could access these benefits, it also boosted scholarship funding.

Then there was the matter of making summer more fun. To reward hardworking students, faculty, and staff, the university started the Summer Term Ice Cream Social featuring Babcock Hall’s finest scoops.

The results were nothing short of spectacular. Students flocked to summer term in 2016, and participation has increased dramatically every year since. Key numbers for 2019 include 750 face-to-face courses, 275 online courses, and six early-start programs for incoming freshmen. The $1.5 million in scholarship funding for 2019 represents a sixtyfold increase from 2015.

And the sweetest number of all: more than 700 scoops were served at the July 9 ice cream social on the Terrace.

Revenue from summer term largely returns to the schools and colleges that run the programs, so they reap the rewards of offering courses that appeal to students’ passions.

“The schools and colleges have reinvested these funds in their students, staff, and infrastructure, meaning that everyone on campus benefits from our more robust summer term,” says Chancellor Rebecca Blank.

Untitled work

Swoon, born Caledonia Curry, came to fame as a street artist. In recent years she’s been featured in museum exhibits from New York to California and as far afield as Paris, London, and Tokyo. At Tandem, she created several prints, the most notable being the untitled work above, which Tandem director Paula Panczenko describes as a multilayered print — it involves lithography, screen printing, hand painting, and gold leaf.

Girl with Dappled Sunlight

The visiting-artist program has been one of Tandem’s pride points. Each artist creates one or more prints with the press. Sales of these limited editions (usually fewer than 30 prints) support the press. Prices for Swoon’s previous works range from hundreds to more than $20,000. Tandem works hang in museums around the country, but one print of each visiting-artist project remains at the UW, joining the collection of the Chazen Museum.

Sonia

You’d never guess that the meal’s host attended college several decades earlier than these students, or that he did so under significantly different circumstances. He has an admirable way of setting aside differences and coaxing out similarities.

• • •

Rod Hassett ’62 excels at making connections. It’s a skill he has brought to lunch tables and conference room tables since deciding — after a nudge from his father early in his college pursuits — that engineering would be a good fit. Engineers analyze problems and suggest solutions within parameters that include affordability and safety, enthusiastically completing complex puzzles while the rest of us may only see the pieces. These specialized skills came naturally to Hassett throughout his lengthy career at Strand Associates, a Madison engineering firm.

After retiring from Strand in 2002, he called upon his knack for mentorship, joining the UW faculty as an adjunct professor and, for 13 years, teaching the capstone design course, which challenges engineering students to tackle real-life projects.

Along the way, Hassett had been nagged by an industry dilemma that couldn’t be solved with carefully designed bridges constructed of steel and concrete. How could a profession heavily represented by white men adequately address the problems found in a broad range of communities and demographics?

“We have huge engineering problems to solve over the next 50 years,” he says, adding that it’s essential to include a diverse societal representation to solve them.

“Diverse groups are going to make smarter decisions than like-minded groups,” Hassett continues. “Those voices needed to be at the table. And many of the problems that we need solved are in the inner cities. There’s no one better to work with the people in the inner cities than the people who grew up there.”

• • •

Hassett knew exactly where to find young people who could be encouraged to follow in his footsteps from the inner city to UW–Madison’s College of Engineering. He graduated from Rufus King High School in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1958, just prior to the city’s dramatic shift in demographics. From 1960 to 1970, Milwaukee’s African American population increased by 68 percent, due in part to migration from Chicago and the South. At Rufus King, minority enrollment slowly grew, reaching one-third by 1964; today, minorities represent 79 percent of the school’s student body.

Now called Rufus King International, the high school’s nearly 1,500 students take challenging precollege coursework. U.S. News & World Report includes it in the magazine’s rankings of nationally recognized high schools. Eighty-five percent of the 2015 graduating class planned to attend college, with another 10 percent intending to enroll in two-year institutions — a significant change from Hassett’s student days.

“My dad was really pro-education, but he came out of the Depression and World War II, and he didn’t have a lot of formal education,” Hassett says. “I grew up in an area where probably less than half of the kids went to college when they got out of high school, but there was no question I was going to college. Education has always been part of my life.”

As Hassett pondered how to bring more diversity into his field, he talked with Jeff Russell, then chair of civil and environmental engineering and today dean of the Division of Continuing Studies. Together they decided to recruit students to be engineers “like Barry Alvarez recruits football players,” Hassett recalls. He worked with the UW Foundation in 2006 to establish a scholarship program specifically designed to support Rufus King students who had an interest in becoming engineers. He provides scholarships for a student’s first two years, and the College of Engineering supports additional years. So far, 15 Rufus King graduates have been named Hassett Scholars. Nine have graduated from the UW — a track record that makes Hassett especially proud — and are now pursuing careers ranging from jet pilot training with the U.S. Air Force to working as a computer programmer at Google. The other six scholars are currently enrolled.

“The scholarship is a means to solving a problem,” Hassett says. “Now there’s a steady stream of kids coming from King. We’re solving a problem one person at a time.”

• • • Coty Weathersby x’19 was among the students having lunch with Hassett at The Sett in Union South last fall. Now a fifth-year senior majoring in chemical engineering, Weathersby supplements her course work with time in a campus research lab. Her current research centers on analyzing bacteria in wastewater; during a stint in a UC–Berkeley lab in summer 2017, she explored harmful contaminants in groundwater.

Although she’d been juggling honor societies and athletics at Rufus King and leaning toward majoring in chemistry, Weathersby says her selection as a Hassett Scholar spurred her to change plans. And she marvels at the interest Hassett shows in the students. “I never thought I’d actually get to see the face behind the scholarship,” she says. “When I first received the award, Rod came to the ceremony [at Rufus King]. That in itself was exciting because he got to meet my sisters and my mom.”

She adds, “I remember getting an email from him at the end of my freshman year that said, ‘Congratulations. I’m proud of you!’ ”

“That individual touch is just very, very rare,” says Mary Fitzpatrick, director of the College of Engineering’s Diversity Affairs Office. “Rod offers mentoring as a seasoned professional. I would even say Rod has mentored us. He continues to make sure that we understand the intent and the goals [of his scholarship].”

Hassett Scholars are part of the college’s larger Leaders in Engineering Excellence and Diversity program, which is designed to support populations that are historically underrepresented in the field, including low-income or first-generation students, women, and students of color. The college takes steps to make sure incoming students are aware of scholarships for which they can apply.

“Engineering is very competitive, and the climate of engineering can be harsh at times,” Fitzpatrick says. “Our message is that you all can succeed, and we’re going to help you succeed. Yes, you have to do the work yourself, but you’ve got a net that’s going to work with you.” The diversity office provides a comfortable space where students can come to hang out and talk between classes, hold math study sessions, and gather over a meal.

Brian Núñez, former director of the Engineering Summer Program and now the director of career advising and wellness at the UW’s medical school, remembers the first time he met Weathersby. “She gave me her résumé and said she was going to run a company one day,” he says with a smile.

That company may well be in Weathersby’s future, but in the meantime, she is honing her leadership skills. She serves as the academic excellence chair for the campus chapter of the National Society for Black Engineers, and she attended the organization’s conference during her sophomore year. “I remember walking into the convention hall, and it was filled with so many black engineers and engineers of color, and I thought, ‘Wow.’ I just don’t see that on TV. I don’t see that in the media, so it was great. It’s a reminder in times when I’m struggling … that there are a lot of other engineers who felt the same thing, but they’ve made it.”

She was one of three students who helped start the UW chapter of the National Organization for the Professional Advancement of Black Chemists and Chemical Engineers. The chapter’s members — numbering about 15 undergraduate and graduate students — do volunteer work and sponsor professional development events.

Weathersby’s motivation for involvement in the organizations, she says, is “making sure future Hassett Scholars have these resources.” She attributes “caffeine and time management” — and learning to say no — to her ability to juggle classes, research, student organizations, and tutoring.

“I don’t want to do something and not do it well,” she says.

Weathersby, who is eyeing graduate school to earn a master’s degree and, possibly, a doctorate, expresses admiration for UW faculty members who both teach and conduct research.

But for now, she emphasizes the powerful force of community. That, she believes, has been the greatest gift of all, in some ways eclipsing the financial support. She keeps in close contact with other Hassett Scholars, including those who have graduated.

Hassett makes sure that current students have ongoing support from each other by scheduling lunch sessions twice a year. “I really want to make sure that the older kids, the more senior people, are sharing their experiences with the younger students,” he says. “They can help each other so much.”

• • •

During last October’s lunch conversation, Hassett encourages each student to tell him what’s new. Weathersby describes her summer at UC–Berkeley. Devin Lafford x’19, a computer engineering student, details an internship at a company that designs medical devices. George Akpan x’19 tells the group that he wants to focus on wind power in his career, plans that earn an enthusiastic “Good for you!” from Hassett. Alexus Edwards x’21 says she’s leaning toward the biomedical field and recounts her summer as an intern with the Milwaukee fire department unit based at the airport.

Hassett nods, smiles, and asks more questions, easily sliding into the mentorship role he enjoys. The topic shifts to Park Street, one of the main thoroughfares to the UW campus, and he tells the students, “Here you had this gorgeous campus, but everyone coming there had to go down this ugly street.” He notes that his firm worked on a plan to give the location new life.

“When you do something like this as an engineer, you have a vision,” he says. “I could see that this was going to be the gateway to the campus.

“That’s one thing that’s nice about being an engineer,” he continues. “You get involved in things like that and you put your footprints in the sand. Early on you can see something, you have a vision for something, and you get it done. And then the rest of the world catches up. You just smile and walk on.”

As the scholars grab their backpacks and head off to their next classes or study groups, Hassett calls out, “Good seeing you guys!” With a smile, he adds, “See you in May — you’ll be a lot smarter by then.”