The first time Alex Pantages saw a house fire at age 15, he knew he would never forget it. Pantages arrived at the scene on a fire truck as a woman stood in her neighbor’s yard, crying and panicking....

When Derek Stillman held the stage at the World Irish Dance Competition, he showed the judges the perfectionism accompanying his rigid form and mountainous personal expectations. What the judges didn’t...

Rebecca Sweeney is the first person in her family to go to college. Her father is a salesman at an auto parts shop, and her mother works as a campus events staff member for Messiah College  near their...

For Eric Daniels, whose philosophy in life is to “always stay positive, because there is always somebody watching,” crying usually seems like a drag. Daniels, 34, grew up in Beltzhoover, a neighborhood...

Elizabeth Dunn was like any other college student who didn’t have the entire road ahead mapped out, until life steered her toward an alternate track. A car crash during Dunn’s junior year of college...

A conversation about religion with a side of pizza was an early course in Nina Visgarda’s conversion to Islam. As a freshman, Visgarda was unsure about her Christian religion and spent countless hours...

During a break at a fall workout for the Pitt women’s basketball team in the main gym of the Petersen Events Center, Ashton Gibbs grabbed a ball from the rack. Its circumference was an inch smaller...

Alex Santos had made up his mind. He was going to quit tennis. Raised in Portugal and 13 years old, the future Pitt women’s tennis coach was frustrated. His then-coach, who was also in charge of other,...