Penn State Years – Shagbark Court

In June 1992, the Tu family sold their old house on Cherry Ridge Road and moved less than a mile away into a new custom-built home on Shagbark Court. Yen-Sheng directed and project-managed the entire transition on her own initiative: selecting and adapting the house plan, hiring a contractor, designing the interior, and furnishing the home with appliances before the family would move in.

The move took place as the children completed junior high and entered high school. In turn, each of the kids would prepare for college applications, and enroll in school of his or her choice. Ben went to Harvard University (’98), Leslie attended Wellesley College (’01), both in the greater Boston area, and Kim attended Swarthmore College (’02) near Philadelphia. Yen-Sheng managed the family budget with considerable creativity to make the tuition payments for three private schools. The high school years would be the last stretch (for a long while) during which everyone was living at home and family vacations were still manageable. Among the memorable trips they took together: a tour of the southwest United States with stops at the Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon and Zion National Parks, and Las Vegas with their cousins in 1992; a weeklong summer holiday in Vancouver, Canada, Seattle, Washington, and national parks in the Pacific Northwest in 1995.

In 2000, Yen-Sheng and David attended the 30th anniversary of their college graduation in Lake Tahoe. At the start of the new millennium, Ben was a graduate student in biochemistry and biophysics at UCSF. Leslie was studying abroad in Athens, Greece at the time. Kim was on the Swarthmore tennis team before she started doing her honors thesis at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School. All three of the Tu children did an undergraduate honors thesis and graduated with high honors in their respective majors: Ben in Chemistry; Leslie in Greek; Kim in Biology with a minor in psychology.

A few years later, Ben completed his Ph.D. from UCSF (2003) and, from there, moved to Dallas, TX to begin a post-doctoral fellowship at UT Southwestern Medical Center. After working in Boston for two years, Leslie returned home to PA and pursued graduate work at Penn State. She earned her M.S. in Information Science and Technology in 2005. Kim spent a summer in Taiwan after graduating from college, then started a Ph.D. program in molecular biology at Princeton University in the fall of 2002. She earned her doctorate in 2008.