I was born in San Francisco and have lived most of my life in Northern California but I did have a brief sojourn in the Northwest to attend Whitworth College and once I spent eight winters in Minnesota. But then I came back. I have worked on the staff of Inter Varsity Christian Fellowship my whole adult life. I started in 1975 working with undergrads in Sonoma County and for the past twelve years have worked with graduate students in Berkeley. My husband helped to start grad student ministry in Inter Varsity and was the first national director for this aspect of Inter Varsity's ministry so I saw the whole thing get born and start to grow up. I like humor, music and pie!

Thera Crane is in her fourth year of Berkeley's PhD program in linguistics. Her dissertation research involves going to remote villages in southern Africa (mostly Zambia) and talking to people in and about an endangered language called Totela, while eating lots and lots of peanuts and cassava. Before grad school, Thera was in Peace Corps (Namibia), and before that, she spent pretty much her whole life in the fields and mountains of Pennsylvania, except for a year in Germany and frequent flights of imagination. Some of Thera's favorite things include books, tea, community, songs, thinking puzzles, and looking at the sky through trees. She also enjoys Carrie's pies. She is still figuring out how to pronounce her first name (the 'h' is silent, for sure, and beyond that, you'll have to ask her mother).

I am from a small town in the bootheel of Missouri. After finishing college in Virginia (Washington and Lee Univ), I spent a couple of years working at the Federal Reserve Bank in Kansas City before coming to California for the first time ever on admitted students weekend at Berkeley. Berkeley has been a lot of fun for me, because I love hiking and people watching, and this is probably the best location in the country for those two things. This is my 4th year in the economics Ph.D. program at Berkeley, where I study health economics - mostly relating to health care technology and pharmaceuticals (fun stuff!). And - just for the record - Carrie is not kidding when she says she likes pie.

John Montague is a second-year law student at Berkeley. He studied philosophy and economics as an undergraduate at the University of Virginia.

Tiffany Tsao is in her fifth year at Berkeley getting a doctorate degree in English. Having started her life as a four-footed sea-slug whose only talent was playing Stravinsky's greatest dance music hits on the cello, she is surprised at how far she has come and the wondrous transformations God has seen fit to perform in the course of her short existence on earth. She enjoys bug-catching, cooking and baking, jogging, and waggling her eleven dainty toes out of sheer God-given joy. She grew up in Singapore and Indonesia.