University of Washington

The University of Washington is the campus where Tully Hart and Kate Mularkey pursue the television-news career they once imagined together. For Tully, it becomes both a training ground and a proving ground: she studies communications, follows news obsessively, and presses toward professional opportunities that the university’s rules and her youth keep just out of reach. For Kate, the same years bring academic success but a more difficult recognition that reporting may not be her own calling. Their paths through the university thus bind friendship to a shared dream while gradually revealing that the dream belongs more fully to one of them.

Campus and Setting

Spread across several miles and made up of hundreds of Gothic buildings, the University of Washington feels like a world unto itself. Its scale daunts Kate when the friends arrive, whereas Tully reads it as a challenge: if she can succeed there, she believes, she can succeed anywhere. The campus is not merely a backdrop to their education; its size and institutional order define the practical obstacles between ambition and access.

The university’s great lecture spaces make those obstacles tangible. In Kane Hall, one of the largest auditoriums on campus, Tully and Kate sit among almost five hundred students, so far from the front that they can barely see the instructor. The person leading the class turns out to be a teaching assistant rather than a professor. Tully questions why a science requirement matters to someone intent on reporting, and is impatient to leave for the newspaper office when it opens. The scene sets her career-minded urgency against the general requirements and mass scale of university life.

Tully’s Preparation and Professional Ambition

Tully treats her time at the University of Washington as preparation for a network reporting job. From the moment she and Kate move into their sorority, she builds a routine around that destination: she takes core communications classes, reads at least four newspapers a day, and watches as many newscasts as she can. Her aim is not simply to earn a degree but to be ready when an opening appears.

That urgency meets the university’s bureaucracy. Tully consults her School of Communications adviser repeatedly as she tries to determine the first phase of her academic plan. The adviser sometimes avoids her in the hall, but she continues asking questions because she wants answers. Yet she cannot enter upper-level broadcasting or journalism classes while she is still too young to qualify. Her persistence cannot accelerate the university’s requirements; she must wait, a condition she finds particularly difficult.

The mismatch between preparation and opportunity shapes Tully’s student life. She sees the journalism coursework as the route toward the work she wants, but the classes she most wants are restricted, and the introductory experience can seem remote from that goal. In Kane Hall, she would rather buy lecture notes than remain in a science lecture and head to the campus newspaper office. Her impatience is more than a dislike of coursework: it reveals how firmly she has organized her identity around the career she expects to pursue.

By the end of her sophomore year, Tully has taken two of Chad Wiley’s courses, Broadcast Journalism I and II. She completes what he asks of her with intense commitment, but does not believe he recognizes her talent. During repeated exercises reading news from a teleprompter, she looks to him for a sign of approval; he offers criticisms and moves on to the next student. As the school year approaches its end, she is still waiting for the recognition she hopes will lead to a summer position at KVTS. The university’s classrooms therefore provide practice, but they do not guarantee that effort will translate into professional access.

Kate’s Changing Course

Kate’s experience at the University of Washington initially appears to validate the friends’ shared plan. She learns to direct Rush Week skits, organize a dance for three hundred people, and feel more at ease among people she does not know. In journalism, her professors praise her work, and she learns to write sharper stories and film them while events are unfolding. These achievements show that she can acquire the skills their reporting dream requires.

Skill, however, does not settle the question of vocation. Kate finds it hard to intrude on people’s grief, while Tully is more willing to push forward and ask questions. Increasingly, Kate holds back from her own stories and edits Tully’s instead. She begins to doubt that she has the temperament for network news or first-rate reporting, even though her grades and professors’ praise suggest she is capable. The tension is between competence and desire: she can do the work, but that does not mean she wants to build her life around it.

Kate privately imagines other futures, including law school, writing novels, and falling in love. She struggles to tell Tully because the reporting plan is not just an academic choice; it is part of the friends’ long-standing picture of a life lived as a team. Kate’s doubt thus turns the university years into a test of whether friendship requires a common ambition. The dream that once helped connect them becomes difficult to share when Kate realizes she may need a path of her own.

Kate eventually explains that she does not eat, sleep, and breathe the news as Tully does. She knows she earns high grades and meets deadlines, but fears that journalism is a field in which more aggressive competitors will outdo her. Margie Mularkey answers by urging her not to mistake present economic hardship and limited opportunity for a reason to stop dreaming. In this exchange, the university’s choices open onto a wider question about how young women imagine work and a future: Kate’s uncertainty is not proof that she lacks ability, but a sign that the profession may not answer her own hopes.

Friendship, Work, and the Shared Dream

The University of Washington gives Tully and Kate a common setting for the ambition first sparked by Jean Enersen’s example. Tully’s dream of becoming a reporter began earlier, in the Mularkey home, after Mrs. Mularkey spoke about Enersen as one of the first women to anchor a nightly news program. At college, that early declaration grows into a career plan; Tully and Kate imagine themselves finding stories and writing them up as a team. The university makes that imagined future feel actionable through courses, student journalism, and broadcasting practice.

But the shared plan is not shared in equal measure. Tully’s relentless preparation and impatience to enter the profession contrast with Kate’s increasing hesitation and her attention to Tully’s work. The difference develops gradually: Kate is praised as a student journalist and gains confidence in other areas of campus life, yet her difficulty pressing into others’ grief makes her question the reporter she is expected to become. Tully, meanwhile, continues to treat the career as the central destination. The campus years expose this divergence before either friend can comfortably name what it means for their partnership.

By November 1981, Kate recognizes that she can no longer follow Tully’s plan indefinitely without being honest about her own wishes. She remembers that Tully once took her hand when no one else would and made a future in television news seem possible. That history gives her hesitation emotional weight: choosing differently risks sounding like a rejection of the friend who helped her imagine a future in the first place. The University of Washington is therefore both the setting of their shared preparation and the place where the limits of that shared future come into view.

Significance

The university’s role in the story lies in the contrast between access, aptitude, and aspiration. Tully’s hunger for news is repeatedly checked by age restrictions, requirements, and the slow pace of instruction, but those barriers intensify rather than redirect her determination. Kate, by contrast, gains skills and approval yet questions whether she wants the work those skills serve. Neither woman’s college experience can be reduced to success or failure: Tully must wait for professional openings, while Kate must distinguish being good at journalism from wanting its life.

As a setting, the University of Washington turns an adolescent promise into a practical and relational problem. The pair’s early idea of becoming reporters together is tested against actual coursework, institutional gates, professional feedback, and different responses to the human demands of reporting. The campus helps Tully move toward a career, but it also makes visible the moment when Kate’s future begins to separate from the one her friend has long imagined for them.