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CONTACT US

Powell Scholars Program
Callison Hall
Courtney Lehmann, Ph.D.
Program Director
209.946.2609
University of the Pacific
3601 Pacific Avenue
Stockton, CA 95211
clehmann@pacific.edu

CONTACT US

Dinelle Davis
Program Assistant
209.946.2283
University of the Pacific
3601 Pacific Ave
Stockton, CA 95211
ddavis@pacific.edu

Special Events

Senior Retreat 2020

For their retreat this year, the senior Powell Scholars traveled to Carmel, CA. On the first day, Dr. Lehmann and the seniors joined founding Powell Scholars Program director Dr. Cynthia Weick and her husband, Dr. Brian Weick for dinner at their home in Carmel. On the second day, the Powell Scholars visited the Monterey Bay Aquarium, followed by a reflection exercise involving the Powell Scholars’ leadership portraits from their Freshman year. The third day involved exploring downtown Carmel and visiting the beautiful coastline.

December 2019 - White Elephant Luncheon

Every December, the Powell Scholars have a White Elephant Luncheon in Callison Hall.

November 2019 - Coco with Live San Francisco Symphony

In November 2019, the Powell Scholars traveled to San Francisco to see a showing of the award-winning (Best Original Song, Best Animated Feature Film) film Coco accompanied by a live performance of the movie score by the San Francisco Symphony

SF Capital Building
SF Capital Building through window of SF Symphony's celebration of Dia de los Muertos

To see more about the program's cultural events, click here.

Senior Reception 2019

On the eve of graduation, senior Powell Scholars and their families celebrate with a special reception in Callison Hall.

Danielle MacArt and her family
Jon Arrow and his family
Megan Waller and her family
Sabrina Grace Boggs and her family
Sarah Jenkins and her family
Luiza Macedo and her family

Senior Retreat 2019

For their senior trip this year, many Powell Scholars were tied up with graduation events. However, Megan, Sarah J., and Luis headed up to King's Beach to see one of the great wonders of the world: Lake Tahoe. On Wednesday night, we enjoyed a beautifully-prepared multi-course dinner at Soule Domain in Brockway, followed by a reflection exercise involving the Powell Scholars’ leadership portraits from their Freshman year. The next day, in addition to walking along the beach, doing yoga on the porch, and savoring lake views from our lovely rental home, we enjoyed a guided tour of three breweries around the lake, learning about the brewing process right down to holding hops in our hands. The day was capped off with an epic battle of The New Yorker cartoon game, followed by great local pizza.

Oregon Shakespeare Festival 2019

On March 21-24, 2019, the Powell Scholars visited the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon. They toured the town and saw three plays - Hairspray, As You Like It, and Mother Road. Play descriptions are from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival official website.

Hairspray: It’s 1962, and Baltimore teenager Tracy Turnblad lives in a world that tells her plus-sized gals shouldn’t be dancing on television and that racial segregation is here to stay. When she wins a spot on The Corny Collins Show, Tracy becomes a star and teams up with her friends Penny, Seaweed, Motormouth Maybelle and hunky Link Larkin to use her newfound fame to challenge the status quo. Director Christopher Liam Moore (The Book of Will, Shakespeare in Love) honors John Waters’ original subversive vision for the story in a wildly joyful production that celebrates radical inclusion at its heart.

As You Like It: Director Rosa Joshi (who helmed 2018’s widely praised Henry V) delves into the search for true love in a wondrous world of wit, transformation, and imagination. Exiled from the controlling confines of the court, Duke Senior and her daughter Rosalind seek refuge — and find much more — in the unconstrained Forest of Arden. Also fleeing danger at home, Orlando encounters a young man named Ganymede and seeks help in love — unaware that Ganymede is actually his heart’s desire, Rosalind, in disguise. “All the world’s a stage” and all society’s rules of conformity are off in this exuberant theatrical journey into one of Shakespeare’s most beloved comedies.

Mother Road: Inspired by John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, this world-premiere drama by Southern Oregon–based playwright Octavio Solis (El Paso Blue, Gibraltar, Quixote) finds hardworking and hard-living William Joad with no blood kin to inherit the family farm. No one, that is, until he finds an unexpected relation: Martín Jodes—a young Mexican-American man descended from Steinbeck’s protagonist Tom Joad. Directed by Bill Rauch in his last season as artistic director, this powerful story about land, family and survival inventively reverses the Joads’ mythic journey from California back to Oklahoma.

November 2018 - Waitress

In November 2018, the Powell Scholars traveled to San Francisco to see Waitress, a musical based on the 2007 film of the same name.

Senior Reception 2018

On the eve of graduation, senior Powell Scholars and their families celebrate with a special reception in Callison Hall.

Ashley Abraham and her family
Courtney Banh and her family
John Livingstone and his family
Nasser Saleh and his family
Ruchika Agrawal and her family
Liana Stoddard and her family

Senior Retreat 2018

Snowed out of their planned retreat in Lake Tahoe, senior Powell Scholars opted for a wine tour of Lodi via limousine for their outing this year. In addition to tasting an array of wines, we learned about the process and business of wine making, and enjoyed making personal connections with the vintners and owners of the establishments we visited.

Oregon Shakespeare Festival 2018

On April 5-8, 2018, the Powell Scholars visited the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon. They toured the town and saw three plays - Destiny of Desire, Othello, and Manahatta.

Destiny of Desire is a musical comedy based on the genre of the Mexican telenovela, or soap opera. A play filled with wicked and wonderful plot twists and turns, Destiny of Desire is a story of social ambition fraught with unexpected romantic trysts and outrageous epiphanies. It is a spectacularly funny romp into a world that has otherwise been confined to television.

Othello is Shakespeare's tragic story of inter-racial romance in 17th century Venice, featuring a forbidden relationship between a white, Venetian Senator's daughter and a black African warrior, who has been brought in as the general of the Venetian Army in the fight against the Ottoman empire. A play with endless contemporary applications about an "extravagant and wheeling stranger," Othello raises questions about our ongoing failure to accommodate difference on - and in - its own terms.

Manahatta, the Lenape Indian territory where contemporary Manhattan now stands, explores the disturbing relationship between the violent removal of Native Americans from their own land and modern day Wall Street, as the story of a Native American securities trader who finds herself torn between these two worlds. The plot alternates between the abuse of Native Americans in the 17th century and the practice of predatory lending that left millions of people without homes during the foreclosure crisis of the Great Recession, tracing a dramatic arc of dispossession throughout U.S. history.