Ursula Collins-Laine '16

Meet Northwest Alum ‘16 Ursula: “Hi, my name is Ursula Collins-Laine and I graduated from Northwest in 2016. I double majored in Cinema and Media Studies & East Asian Area Studies at USC. Currently, I am working as an escape room designer and virtual event manager who occasionally teaches circus. My goal is to eventually design challenges for TV shows!

Activities and moments that happened around Northwest and within the actual classwork are what have stuck with me the most. The meandering discussions of the philosophy club that met at Kaladi Brothers truly expanded my world view and questioned ingrained beliefs, commutes to and from school with classmates prompted lasting friendships, being tangentially involved with the theater department, goofing around in French class, and ultimately feeling love, support, and joy when everyone in the my class wore a tutu I made for them on the final Tuesday of senior year to celebrate Tutu Tuesday are just several examples.

Northwest definitely prepared me for my course work at USC (though 8am classes in college were a different beast than starting school at 8am at Northwest).

There were definitely areas of academic interest that started at Northwest that carried through all the way to my graduate thesis, specifically the impacts of globalization and media on society and vice versa. This gave me the foundation that allowed me to be a research fellow at the Korean Studies Institute starting in my freshman year of school.

Sometimes, though, the areas that my time at Northwest shown through the most at college were often in unexpected ways. For example, I starred in a music video that required top of the head mask work that I was familiar with courtesy of Scott Davis’s Mask, Mime, and Improv class.

When my friends toss around riddles, I get great joy at throwing in the Impossible (Sum and Product) Puzzle introduced in Glen Sterr’s Philosophy class and solved after school with Alex Chen and Mimi Yang’s Math Club. I’ve seen friends write computer programs to solve it, spend afternoons with pen and paper, and have it become a spectator sport during a weekend trip.” #nwsalumnistories