Dear Friends, Signs of Spring are definitely showing on campus. Something about flowers blooming has students preemptively looking forward to the end of the academic year and the beginning of summer. According to predictions March 23-April 3 is the peak time to come and see the cherry blossoms. While the Department of Sociology continues to face significant budgetary challenges and some hard balls are being pitched our way--faculty, students and staff continue to come out swinging (the fact that I'm a baseball geek saves you all from saltier language.) We recently welcomed admitted graduate students for Visiting Day after a difficult review process where the committee had to choose from a pool of over 190 applicants. Each year it becomes a bit harder to choose as our cohorts shrink, but we continue to attract excellent students who do amazing research and make crucial contributions to our central department missions. Our faculty continue to do cutting-edge research and are still earning grants that will help us continue our work with Sound Transit, the Puyallup Tribal Historic Preservation Department Family Data Reclamation Project, and more. These kinds of collaborations help our students experience and learn skills they can use both inside and outside of academia and help apply and translate our research where it can do the most good--in our communities. Faculty and graduate students also continue to garner local, national, and international recognition in publications and media outlets. You can read more about that below or in the publications section of our website. So, despite significant challenges created by budget cuts and administrative decisions outside the department, our people continue to take joy in their work to educate students, develop new insights about complex social processes, and find ways to translate this new knowledge to benefit our community. With this in mind, we hope you'll think of our department in your giving plans on Husky Giving Day, April 23. The University of Washington has had a distinguished Department of Sociology since the 1920s and has ranked in the Top 20 programs in the U.S. for many years. During these difficult times, your support to the Friends of Sociology Fund helps our faculty and students to excel in our research, continue to analyze the social issues in our world—and find solutions to make our world a better place--which is more important now than ever. As always, thank you for being a part of our community! Kyle Crowder Department Chair
Blumstein-Jordan Professor of Sociology | 
