Stella Mercer ’25 & Watzek welcome you to campus for the fall
Watzek Library welcomes everyone to campus for the fall term with a new set of banners (and bookmarks!) designed by recent alum Stella Mercer ’25.
Originally from Seattle, Washington, Stella Mercer graduated this past May with a degree in Environmental Studies. Stella shared that her design for this year’s welcome banners was inspired by three things: a wish to touch on some aspect of the college experience, her love for LC’s beautiful campus, and her fiendish desire to make a good pun.
As I thought about what advice I would want to give to welcome incoming students, I kept coming back to the reminder that we are all here to grow. This can be a grounding thought when going through challenges and a guiding principle when deciding what paths to take.
I settled on the phrase “Here We Grow” because it expresses the sentiment I was going for while evoking both plants and students, and on top of that sounds like “Here we go”! This little triple meaning satisfied my pun criteria.
Visually, I wanted to draw something specific not only to the Northwest, but LC. In an early draft I planned to pair “here we grow” with botanical illustrations of native plants to more explicitly connect the phrase to the plants and introduce students to our ecosystem, but it didn’t feel connected enough to the LC student experience. So, I thought through some iconic campus locations and settled on the bridge. When I think of the bridge I first think of the sweet woody smell, then the view of the forest around, then how you can see elongated triangles of people’s wet footsteps going in either direction, fading as they move across in opposite gradients (look for this next time it’s kinda cool and I didn’t explain it very well), then the time I’ve spent on it. I remember fishing over the edge in the springtime, getting a FaceTime from my NST participants as they threw a watermelon over the edge, walking with friends in the misty late late nights, and sprinting across for some game I can’t even remember the rules to.
Stella’s proudest moment as an LC student was winning the campus-wide Survivor game last spring. Now, Stella can be found hiking remote areas of the Whiskeytown National Recreation Area looking closely at plants as a Biological Services Technician for the National Park Service.
Happy fall term, everyone. Let’s g(r)o(w)!
Stella Mercer ’25 at Whiskeytown National Recreation Area
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