Jacqueline Whitham, who majored in chemistry but had an interest in art, wants her gift to make it easier for students to do cross-disciplinary projects.
The road to a university degree may not always be a straight path. Physicists may dabble in painting, engineers may have a serious thing for English lit and drama students might be drawn to software coding. That’s what it was like for Jacqueline Whitham at Santa Clara University. So the 2021 graduate made a $3.8 million donation to SCU to provide a smoother path for others on similar academic journeys.
Whitham, who made the donation with her Denver family’s foundation, had interests in chemistry, mechanical engineering and art. She eventually figured out a way to incorporate all of her interests into her degree trajectory — adding minors in mechanical engineering and sculpture to her chemistry major — but it took her five years to finish and said she often felt alone in the effort.
Her donation will fund three or four grants each year for cross-disciplinary collaborations involving faculty members and student research, with preference for projects that include at least one person from the arts. Whitham says she hopes it encourages students to pursue cross-disciplinary work and discover — as she did — how it can help in unexpected ways.
“Art was a creative outlet, which connected me to people and my other studies in the craziest ways,” said Whitham, who is now working for a startup in Campbell. “Creativity really fed into helping me understand so many concepts. I want to help people who want to walk similar paths.”After two years of being confined to online events, the San Jose Poetry Festival is back this year, kicking off Wednesday with a 7 p.m. event at Mama Kin in downtown San Jose and continuing all week.
It culminates with the San Jose Poetry Slam on Sunday night at downtown’s Tabard Theatre, which has entered a partnership with Poetry Center San Jose to provide the festival with a new home. The 7 p.m. Poetry Slam will feature San Francisco Poet Laureate Tongo Eisen Martin, whose 2017 book “Heaven Is All Goodbyes” received an American Book Award and California Book Award the following year and was shortlisted for the Griffin International Poetry Prize.
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