Essays, Features, Profiles / Jody Ulate

Essays

Washington Square, Fall/Winter 2019 • December 11, 2019

Editor’s Perspective: Ode to Joy

What I didn’t know about Beethoven as a child was that I’d grow to be an inch shorter and orders of magnitude tidier than he reportedly was. Learning to play the violin was all “perfect practice makes perfect” and had little to do with studying the life of the revolutionary composer. What I also didn’t know was that he claimed his role as an artist. Or that, despite failing health and being deaf, he composed what many consider the greatest piece of music of all time.

Washington Square, Spring/Summer 2019 • August 20, 2019

Editor’s Perspective: The Big Why

Through a square window in the Hugh Gillis Hall classroom door, I see Communication Studies Lecturer Beth Von Till, ’86 MA Communication Studies, welcoming her class. She has asked me to give one of a series of guest lectures in her Communication and Organizational Philanthropy course, where students are learning to create fundraising campaigns.

Washington Square, Spring/Summer 2017 • August 22, 2019

Editor’s Perspective: Gram’s Stories

There’s a photograph of my grandmother that always makes me want to sing the Polish refrain in Bobby Vinton’s “My Melody of Love.” Gram is sitting in her doorway with her black hair covered with a kerchief, spending time with a feathered friend. She’s not singing in the photo, but I would bet she was humming, as she did often.

Washington Square, Fall/Winter 2016 • August 21, 2019

Editor’s Perspective: Finders, Keepers

Leaning into cold gusts hurtling off the ocean, I walked toward the flashing light of the three-ton lens atop Point Cabrillo Light Station. For most of the last century, lighthouse keepers made lives of standing watch over this piece of the Mendocino Coast, ensuring safe passage for ships along the rocky shoreline.

Washington Square, Fall/Winter 2015 • August 21, 2019

Editor’s Perspective: Common Threads

The Army was a world of right angles and precisely defined rules. At close inspection, even my uniform’s woodland camouflage fabric had a tiny grid pattern and regulations for how to wear it. Gripping my orange-handled scissors, I was confronted with the uniform’s rigid structure and, unexpectedly, what it represented.

Features

Washington Square, Spring/Summer 2019 • August 20, 2019

Seeing it Through

There is a quiet space on the top floor of San Jose State’s new Spartan Recreation and Aquatic Center. In an area alongside a row of exercise studios, above the reflective water of the recreational pool, Cathy Busalacchi, ’76 Recreation, drinks her morning coffee and admires a view that has been decades in the making.

Washington Square, Fall/Winter 2018 • August 20, 2019

Big Network, Small World

It was time to pitch her idea. In a black blazer and slacks, Jasmine Sanchez took her place next to a large LCD presentation screen, glowing bright blue with the logo for Vessel Athletics, the company she’s trying to launch. Outside the clear glass doors of the Idea Lab, the voices and footsteps of San Jose State students echoed in the corridor of the Diaz Compean Student Union.

Washington Square, Winter 2012 • August 20, 2019

Girls Can’t Be Engineers

Six-year-old Huy Tran dangled from a mango tree branch, spying through a hole in a hut’s palm roof. Below, the muted glow of a nine-inch black and white television flickered in the crowded room. Everyone had gathered to watch the Americans land on the moon. Peering through the part in the roof, Huy Tran witnessed Neil Armstrong bounce along the moon’s surface in his space suit. That day in July 1969, she began to dream. One moment. That’s all it takes for a spark to ignite.

Washington Square, Winter 2012 • August 22, 2019

Soldiering Up

“Is it real?” a student asks, pointing to Marlon Scott’s desert camouflage backpack. “Do you mean the material? Of course, it’s real,” says Scott, a San José State political science major and former Marine Corps corporal. He knows what the student is actually asking. One of the many questions he frequently evades: Were you over there? What did you see? Are you crazy? After two deployments to Iraq with his infantry unit, Scott decided to get out of the military and go to school.

Profiles

Washington Square, Fall/Winter 2018 • August 21, 2019

Michael Sera: Be the Bridge

In between is where Michael Sera thrives. He travels back and forth between cultures, past and present, business and community work, attempting to help people understand each other.

Washington Square, Spring/Summer 2018 • August 21, 2019

Yvonne Escalante: Forging Tradition from Maize to Mace

A master craftsman named Leonidas Pratt poured corn, wine and oil on the first foundation stone of San Jose State’s first campus building, declaring it “well formed, true and trusty.” Yvonne Escalante, ’13 MFA Spatial Arts, considered that momentous day in 1870 and other elements of SJSU history when she set out to design and create the university’s new ceremonial mace.

Washington Square, Spring 2011 • August 22, 2019

Linda Levine: Life's a Tossup

Crescendos of laughter spill from the seams of Linda Levine’s classroom door into the hush of the hallway outside. As the door swings open on the last day of class, nattering students pour out of the room. Around their necks, white paper plates with fluted edges dangle from fuzzy red yarn. The plates are scrawled with compliments from classmates in bright blue, purple and green ink. Some students place their plate-medallions in backpacks and wait in line to hug Levine before they go.