Introducing Cassandra Sato

Dear Readers: As part of our five-year anniversary celebration, we are throwing it back to where everything started. The smart, sassy voice of Cassandra Sato, newly minted Vice-President for Student affairs at Morton College. If you are new to Cassandra and her friends, here’s a peek behind the scenes from her point of view. Welcome to the series!

Aloha, Cassandra Sato here.

What was I thinking, swapping Hawaii’s sunny paradise for Nebraska’s unpredictable charms?

I was fresh from the island of Oahu, Hawai’i, diving headfirst into my dream administrator job at Morton College. Flowers were blooming, the breeze was just right, and my ambitions were as high as the July temperatures. It all seemed perfect… until it wasn’t.

Two months in, and my dream morphs into a scene straight out of CSI. A Deaf student’s untimely death spirals into a tangled mess involving campus food service, suspicious beef supplies, and murky cancer research. As if adjusting to a new job wasn’t tricky enough, now I’m surfing through a rough swell, each wave more unpredictable than the North Shore in February.

Then there’s Lance Erickson, the Deaf work-study student with secrets of his own, wrapped in a visual world I can hardly breach with my rudimentary ASL. Throw in a too-curious sheriff, a relentless reporter breathing down my neck, a boss who’d rather sweep everything under the rug, and a stalker masquerading as Zorro—yeah, you heard that right.

Now, I’m caught in the eye of a storm, where unmasking truths could mean the difference between clearing an innocent student’s name and becoming the next headline. Morton College promised a new chapter, but I didn’t expect it to be a mystery novel with me as the reluctant protagonist.

Death by Dissertation is my tale of survival in the academic wilderness. A crash course in resilience, sleuthing, and the art of academic speak under pressure. Can I navigate this crazy episode and solve a murder without flunking out of Nebraska? Let’s find out, shall we?