Ways to interact with PUGS:

The Team

Douglas Tsoi | Founder

Douglas Tsoi created Portland Underground Grad School in November 2014 because he always missed school. Every day he was always tempted with going back to grad school, but didn’t want to pay tens of thousands of dollars or uproot his life to go get another degree. What he really wanted was school for the rest of my life.

So he created the thing he wanted: school for everyday life. It was a way for him and other lifelong learners to meet and stay intellectually engaged. At the same time, it was a way for local experts to share their knowledge without a big institution in the way. It was just better than learning on the internet; there’s something qualitatively different about learning in person, with other people, compared to learning by yourself. The experience is just richer, more fun, and more soul-feeding.

Previous to running PUGS, Douglas was a lawyer, Quaker schoolteacher, and government sustainability manager. He has also trained as a Franciscan spiritual director. When he’s not running PUGS, he creates projects like the Gratitude Dojo and The Appreciation Effect, and write a well-received Substack newsletter called Money and Meaning.

Emilie Wapnick | Operations Manager

Emilie Wapnick is an award-winning author, speaker, and community builder. As the Founder and Managing Director of Puttylike, Emilie has spent over 15 years supporting multipotentialites—people with many passions and creative pursuits—in building dynamic, fulfilling, and unconventional lives. Their TED talk, Why Some of Us Don’t Have One True Calling, has been viewed over 9 million times, and their book, How to Be Everything (HarperCollins, 2017), won a Nautilus Book Award and has been translated into 13 languages.

Emilie sees PUGS as an extension of the multipotentialite movement and brings their love of systems, collaboration, and creative problem-solving to the role of Operations Manager.

A lifelong multipotentialite themself, Emilie studied music, communications, film production, and law, graduating from the Law Faculty at McGill University. Fun fact: their wife, Valerie, previously held the same position at PUGS—so Emilie’s connection runs deep.