Photo Essay

Collection of photos from the Panhellenic Council's 2024 Bid Day.

In the days leading up to the first day of the fall semester, hundreds of students could be seen wondering around campus, dashing through the ornate houses on Sorority Row, adjusting the larger-than-life personalized Pi Chi hats, and hoping to find the chapter meant for them. At the beginning of the Panhellenic Council's formal recruitment process for Fall 2024, 1,761 potential new members embraced Florida's muggy August heat in search of a bid from a sorority come Friday, Aug. 23, 2024. After a grueling weeklong process, more than 1400 PNMs opened their bid cards in the Stephen C. O'Connell center to the sounds of thunderous screams and joyful tears, all to rush to the buses waiting outside to take them to their new sisters. Sorority Row was filled with even more gleeful shrieks, DJs blasting the latest club hits, and hugs so powerful that they could be mistaken for tackles strong enough to take out an NFL wide receiver.

A dozen students studies in Everglades National Park through a winter session. 

The team's travels to the Bahamas Bowl. 

Images from the annual Oozefest event that capture the fun and the mud. 

Engineering students design and detonate custom tests to measure the raw force of battlefield blasts. Outfitting lifelike mannequins and proprietary devices with battlefield sensors, they laser align the devices and sensors,  pack charges, trigger explosions of various strengths, and gather data on pressure, trauma, and survivability—advancing science to protect those in harm’s way.

The UNC Wilmington men's basketball team won the Coastal Athletic Association championship defeating Delaware. This was the league-record seventh CAA championship for the Seahawks and secured a trip to the NCAA tournament.

Photos from the University of Georgia Spring 2025 commencement ceremony in Sanford Stadium.

The Interdisciplinary Field Program provides students a chance to earn credits in ecology, geology, and anthropology through studies in National Parks during a 2 month long summer road trip across the United States.

In the town of Kalimpong, where the ridges of the Himalayan foothills ripple high above the Teesta River, the narrow roads are more than a way of getting from here to there.

Instead, the road flows like a river, alive with a current of people and activity: colorful cars that honk helpfully before rounding corners; satchel-lugging school children; doctors and lawyers heading to in-town offices. Along its edges, mechanics tinker with engines and storekeepers open up shop for the day.

For several weeks in January, 14 Colby students and their professors joined the river’s flow almost every morning as they made their way a few miles from the peaceful farm where they stayed to the bustling streets of the market town below. The community, located less than 100 miles from a high mountain pass that connects India to Lhasa, Tibet, served as an important gateway for trade between those nations during the first half of the 20th century.

The adventure of being on the road—of slowing down and using all one’s senses to take in the sounds, smells, and sights—is something that can’t be imagined, or read about in a book, or substituted with virtual reality.

And it’s one reason why these students traveled thousands of miles to experience this particular place in person. They weren’t tourists passing through in search of a dramatic view or an exotic photo for Instagram, but academic adventurers seeking to experience Kalimpong in a way that is deliberate and thoughtful, curious and intentional.

Less than a day before his debut fashion show was scheduled to start in an event space in Manhattan’s Garment District, designer Jack Richard ’25 was scrambling to finish accessorizing the collection in the Lyons Arts Lab workshop space on the third floor of the Runnals Building. 

In some ways, it felt like a race against the clock. Would he be able to get himself and his “looks” to New York City with enough time to set up for the Monday evening show? Many of the 13 other Colby students helping make the show happen were already in New York City. “Dude, you gotta get here quick,” one told him Sunday afternoon. 

Richard made it, arriving in the city just before dawn the morning of the show. He catnapped for a couple of hours before getting to work again, only stopping when he broke a cast-iron grommet press just before it was time to load his pieces into the Manhattan Mirage event space on West 37th Street. 

And yet the show, the first collaboration between the Lyons Arts Lab and the Halloran Lab for Entrepreneurship and held during the hubbub of New York Fashion Week, sparkled.