San Diego State University is Celebrating 125 Years
Big name concerts, cultural and educational programs, world class athletics, great eats — and other reasons to visit San Diego’s oldest institution of higher learning this year.
Sponsored Content Provided by San Diego State University
Even if you’re not one of San Diego State University’s nearly 500,000 living alumni, chances are you’ve visited campus for a concert or an Aztecs game. If not, now’s a great time to take the College Avenue off-ramp when you spot the SDSU freeway marquee sign on Interstate 8.
San Diego’s oldest institution of higher learning officially kicked off a 600-day celebration of its 125th anniversary on March 14.
Once founded in 1897 as a training school for aspiring elementary teachers, and located above a drugstore in the present-day Gaslamp Quarter, today SDSU is a nationally ranked, internationally known academic and research powerhouse that provides billions in annual economic impact in San Diego and communities around the world.
Away from the high-tech labs and lecture halls on campus, you’ll find hidden gems like public art, a turtle pond and peaceful gardens. And with SDSU Mission Valley — a new stadium, Snapdragon Stadium, opening soon — there’ll be even more places for you to visit. Here’s your cheat sheet:
Coming Soon — SDSU Mission Valley and Snapdragon Stadium
Snapdragon Stadium
Snapdragon Stadium, the first feature of SDSU Mission Valley, will open Sept. 3 for the Aztec football team’s home opener against the University of Arizona Wildcats. The 35,000-capacity stadium will include food options from local eateries including Hodad’s, The Crack Shack, Cali BBQ, Best Pizza and Brew, Everbowl, Gaglione Brothers, The Taco Stand and Batch & Box. In addition to SDSU football, women’s lacrosse, women’s soccer and men’s soccer, the venue will be home to the San Diego Wave Futbol Club, the National Women’s Soccer League expansion team, and the San Diego Legion, the Major League Rugby (MLR) team.
Approximately 80 acres of community park and open space, including a 34-acre River Park scheduled for completion in 2023, will also be a centerpiece of SDSU Mission Valley. Construction on the SDSU Mission Valley Innovation District where SDSU researchers will work alongside public and private partners, as well as a residential community including affordable housing, will also begin as soon as 2023 (next year!).
Did You Know?
SDSU generates more than $5.6 billion in annual economic activity in the San Diego region, according to the most recent estimate.
-About 75% of the County of San Diego’s public health workforce are alumni of SDSU’s School of Public Health
-Alumna Ellen Ochoa was NASA’s first Latina astronaut in space and director of its Johnson Space Center
-Other well-known alumni include: Rubio’s Coastal Grill Founder Ralph Rubio, film producer Kathleen Kennedy, Mandalorian actor Carl Weathers, Blenders Eyewear CEO Chase Fisher, the late legendary conceptual artist John Baldessari and former San Diego Mayors Kevin Faulconer and Jerry Sanders. Two others from the world of sports: Major League Baseball pitcher Stephen Strasburg and NBA star Kawhi Leonard, who both earned postseason MVP awards in the same year (2019). And, of course, the greatest Padre of them all: Tony Gwynn.
-U.S. President John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Cesar Chavez and Eleanor Roosevelt all gave speeches at SDSU.
-Lady Gaga, Ella Fitzgerald, Buffalo Springfield, Bob Dylan, Ray Charles, Joan Baez, Fleetwood Mac and Rihanna have all rocked SDSU venues.
Must-See Spots on Campus
SDSU Healing Garden
Healing Garden
If you haven’t been to campus for a few years, you’ve never seen the newest landmark: the Native and Indigenous Healing Garden. One of the newest features of the SDSU landscape is just steps away from the original buildings of the Main Quad.
Developed early in 2020, the garden recognizes both the university’s Aztec identity and its location on historic Kumeyaay land. It is a place that embodies the symbols and plants of life and of healing — physically, mentally and emotionally — and also features a 60-foot mural, designed by students, that captures the significance of plants to Indigenous life in the region of the Aztecs. Learn more about SDSU’s Healing Garden.
SDSU
Headlining Performances Under the Stars
Come for a concert at the Cal Coast Credit Union Open Air Theatre at SDSU (upcoming shows include Interpol, April 29; New Kids On The Block, May 26; Tenacious D, June 26; David Gray, July 31; Alicia Keys, Sept. 9) — stay for the great eats and scenic spots. For a list of upcoming events and concerts, visit the CalCoast Credit Union Open Air Theatre page.
For still more botanical delights, head over to the Mediterranean Garden, between the Physical Sciences and Life Sciences Buildings and Hepner Hall. This peaceful enclave, developed in the mid-’90s, includes plants from five continents and a fountain from Baja California—a gift from the senior class of 1997. This is a popular spot to meet up with friends or enjoy a picnic before catching a show at the Cal Coast Credit Union Open Air Theater.
Relax, meditate and look — but please don’t touch or feed the inhabitants. The koi and turtle pond outside of Scripps Cottage (another campus treasure) is widely considered the most peaceful place on campus.
TapRoots
Arriving at campus by trolley? Before leaving the only underground station on the MTS Green Line, look above and below for two public art features: the “TapRoots” descending from the station’s ceiling, and 60 granite stepping stones with symbols representing academic disciplines at SDSU.
Before the station opened in 2005, Carlsbad artist Anne Mudge worked with a design team and the Metropolitan Transit System on a variety of striking art components, drawing full attention to its underground location as the showcase station of the Green Line. Her stainless steel “TapRoots” descend from the station’s ceiling as if connected to trees planted above. Underfoot, she designed 60 granite stepping stones with symbols for the academic disciplines at SDSU: comedy and tragedy masks for theater; a glucose formula for chemistry.
Who needs advertising when you can turn a bench into a work of art? The student-designed and painted benches, part of Arts Alive SDSU, can be found all over campus, with some adorning historic Works Progress Administration benches from the previous century. View Art Benches Slideshow
Aztec Lanes
Aztec Lanes
Aztec Lanes is SDSU’s bowling and games center open to students, faculty/staff and community members located on the first floor of the Conrad Prebys Aztec Student Union. Enjoy 12 bowling lanes as well as a games lounge including big-screen TVs, billiards, table tennis and gaming consoles. Aztec Lanes offers a multitude of services, including bowling classes, social leagues, reservations and special events.
Families can enjoy Kids Bowl Free all summer long from May 14 to August 21, register today!
For rates, reservations, and more information visit the Aztec Lanes site here.
Studio S
JULY 7, 2026
Xplosion Box: A Customized Keepsake Your Loved Ones Won’t Forget
A customized memory-filled explosion gift box is a creative way to show someone you care
Finding a gift that feels truly personal can be surprisingly difficult. In a sea of generic options — flowers, gift cards, candles, and the like — Xplosion Box offers something more lasting: a customized keepsake built around the photos, messages, and memories that matter most.
Founded by Southern California entrepreneur Jay Vijay, Xplosion Box LLC creates fully customized explosion gift boxes that arrive professionally designed, printed, assembled, and ready to gift. Each box opens layer by layer to reveal personal photos, heartfelt messages, pull-out albums, origami-style photo pockets, and hidden notes, turning a simple gift into an emotional reveal.
The brand was built for people who want to give something meaningful without spending hours printing photos, cutting paper, folding cardstock, or assembling a DIY project. Customers simply choose a box, upload their favorite photos, add personal messages, and the Xplosion Box team transforms those details into a polished keepsake that feels thoughtful, personal, and beautifully made.
Xplosion Box offers personalized gift boxes for birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, graduations, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Valentine’s Day, Christmas, proposals, bridesmaid gifts, long-distance relationships, and thoughtful “just because” moments.
Customers can choose from flexible customization options starting at $27. The Mini Surprise Box includes 10 photos, three message cards, and one hidden secret note, while the Mega Surprise Box offers a fuller keepsake experience with 40 photos, three message cards, and one hidden secret note.
What sets Xplosion Box apart is its high level of customization combined with convenience. Filled with personal photos, custom text, decorative details, and layered surprises, each box gives customers the freedom to create a gift that feels one-of-a-kind — without having to make it themselves.
At its core, Xplosion Box helps people turn favorite photos, stories, and words into something tangible: a keepsake that can be opened, revisited, and remembered long after the occasion has passed. asion has passed.
If you’re anything like us, it can be easy to get so caught up in taking care of everyone else, that your own needs get lost in the ether. But while this may be a cliché, that doesn’t make it any less true: You can’t give your best self to other people unless you’re taking care of yourself.
Sometimes, that looks like stopping in for your regular acupuncture or chiropractic appointment. Other days, it means giving your body the fresh, organic fuel it needs to truly feel and function at its best. And some other times still, it involves leaving your responsibilities behind for a weekend to pamper yourself at an incredible resort and spa.
Only you can decide what your truly need. We’re just here to help you find the best ways to get it.
Tommy Bahama Miramonte Resort & Spa
Island living meets desert luxury at the Tommy Bahama Miramonte Resort & Spa in Indian Wells. When you step onto the 11-acre property, you’ll be surrounded by sweeping view of the Santa Rosa Mountains with olive trees and fragrant citrus groves decorating the grounds. In other words, everything about this relaxed but refined resort is primed to help you let go of the stress from home and enjoy easy sun-soaked days and gorgeous starry nights.
The rooms blend calming, woven textures with Tommy Bahama’s signature tropical prints and feature private lanais, making it easy unwind the moment you walk in the door. If you book one of the four Villa Suites, you’ll be treated to exclusive Tommy Bahama furniture and unique personal touches to further that feeling of instant ease.
At the award-winning Spa Rosa, the expert team will help reset and recharge your body and mind using methods and rituals inspired by the desert. The 12,000-square-foot retreat includes outdoor soaking pools, eucalyptus steam rooms, and outdoor cabanas, as well as massages, facials, and body masks—all aimed at creating a day dedicated to you. We’re particularly partial to the Day Long Escape, an indulgent all-day affair of CDBs soaks, renewing scrubs, life changing massages, and transformative facials.
Following your treatment, continue the experience with a meal on the patio at Grapefruit Basil. We love the Hamachi Crudo, a light, citrus-forward dish featuring premium yellowtail, house-made ponzu, creamy avocado, and fresh seasonal garnishes.
Whether you’re strolling the gardens, relaxing beside its saltwater pools, or indulging in a restorative treatment, you’ll be able to escape in style and relax in luxury at the Tommy Bahama Miramonte Resort & Spa.
Healcove Chiropractic
There’s no shortage of ways to stay active in San Diego—but if you really want to enjoy everything the city has to offer, you’ve got to make sure you’re giving your body its tune-ups. Enter: Healcove Chiropractic. The board-certified chiropractors and wellness professionals at Healcove are experts at addressing that stage where you’re not injured, exactly, but you’re not at 100%, either. Maybe you’re feeling a bit tense or stressed out. Or it could be that you’re not quite moving the way you want to. Sometimes, it’s just that the accumulation of days, weeks, or even years of daily strain is starting to take a toll. No matter what stage you find yourself at, the Healcove Chiropractic team can provide integrated, preventative care centered on long-term, science-backed approaches that ensure you can always stay active and live the life you want to live pain-free.
This starts by providing truly individualized care. Every patient can expect a thorough 60-minute consultation session that includes a posture and movement screening. This allows the team to develop a completely personalized plan. That plan might include chiropractic care, acupuncture, or massage therapy, as well as functional fitness training, vibration and sound therapy, and Dynamic Neuromuscular Stabilization, a clinical rehabilitation method that retrains the body’s stabilization systems. Whatever the team recommends, you can be sure that it’s tailored to meeting your body’s needs today and the future.
There’s a reason that San Diego Magazine named Healcove the “Best Chiropractor in San Diego”—don’t wait until you’re struggling with an injury to find out why. Book an appointment today for holistic, integrated care that helps ground and heal your body before it reaches a crisis point.
Juice Holler
West Coast wellness culture meets the community feel of Southern Appalachia at Juice Holler. Juice Holler’s menu consists of made-to-order smoothies and smoothie bowls, as well as grab-and-go cold-pressed juices, wellness shots, salads, and more. It operates from the blissfully simple premise that fueling up with food and drink that’s guilt-free and good your body should be simple, accessible, and, above all else, delicious. And if you haven’t yet made it out to the Encinitas café, which opened just this year, let us be the first to tell you: Juice Holler delivers on each and every of these fronts.
We love the Supercharger smoothie, a mood-lifting and body-fueling option made with banana, almond butter, blue spirulina, maca, grass-fed whey protein, raw cacao nibs, medjool dates, and coconut milk. We’re also partial to the Thrive Alive smoothie bowl, where avocado, mango, sea moss, spirulina, mint, coconut milk, and agave are mixed and topped with coconut, chia seeds, strawberry, mango, and chocolate drizzle. The wellness shots include the Detoxifier, a cleansing blend of kale, cucumber, lemon and spirulina, plus a shot specially designed to fight inflammation (named, fittingly, Anti-Inflammation). Probiotic overnight oats, lemon turmeric bars, and strawberry shortcake chia pudding are other standouts on the grab-and-go menu.
Much of the vibe feels beachy North County chic—think green tile with orange and pink accents, grounded with greenery and natural wood—but Juice Holler founder Kelly Sergott, a longtime Encinitas local, has also enfused the space with her Kentucky roots. In Appalachia, a holler is small valley between hills and mountains, where nature reigns, community is king, and nourishment comes right from the land. At Juice Holler, Sergott has created a holler for the busy modern times, using local ingredients to create a spot for people to come together and enjoy fresh, fast, feel-good fuel for their day.
Everwell Acupuncture
We’ve all had that experience with a medical professional where we’ve felt rushed, ignored, or misunderstood—and ultimately, like we didn’t get the answers that we needed. But at Everwell, the holistic acupuncture practice located in Solana Beach, the care team wants to transform your understanding of what healthcare can look like.
Patients at Everwell experience care rooted in intentional listening and radical empathy—and trust us, those aren’t just corporate buzzwords. This place actually puts those ideas into practice. You will always be given the time you need to tell your story— initial in-take appointments are two hours long—and you can rest assured that your story will be believed. Every single question and concern will be addressed by a dedicated practitioner who wants to find the specific solutions that work best for you, and you’ll receive care that’s aimed at healing the body, mind, and spirit.
Everwell’s highly trained, doctorate-level practitioners blend evidence-based acupuncture with the practice of classical Chinese medicine. (If you’ve never tried acupuncture before or aren’t sure if the team will be a fit, we’d highly recommended Everwell’s complimentary 20-minute consultations.) Research shows that by stimulating specific points on the body, acupuncture activates a natural healing response in the body, helping to restore balance, regulate the nervous system, and improve overall wellbeing. This allows the practice to address an incredibly wide range of conditions from chronic pain and autoimmune disorders to digestive issues, from stress and burnout to headaches migraines, fertility and postpartum struggles, hormonal imbalances, sleep concerns and more.
At Everwell, you can expect to feel heard, trusted, respected, and cared for. This is a space that doesn’t want to be just another healthcare provider you visit; it wants to provide patients with dedicated partner who will be there for their entire health journey.
You’ve Tracked Your Macros, Your Sleep, Your Steps. What About Your Drinking?
The Unconscious Moderation app is helping health-conscious professionals take an honest look at their drinking, without pressure, and without quitting as the only option.
San Diego runs on optimization. Early mornings, clean eating, training logs, sleep scores. The people here take their health seriously and the results usually show. Most of them also have two drinks most nights, not because anything is wrong, but because the day was long and the glass is right there and it has always been right there.
That routine doesn’t get the same scrutiny as the rest of the stack. It doesn’t feel like something to examine. It feels like a reward.
Which is exactly what your brain has decided it is. When something reliably moves you from one state to another, your brain files it under things to repeat. Do it consistently enough and the cue stops requiring a decision. It’s 6pm, the laptop is closed, and some part of your brain has already placed the order.
Most habit-change tools work on the number. They count drinks, set weekly targets, send check-in texts. That’s useful for seeing what the pattern looks like. It doesn’t tell you where the pattern came from, or change it at that level.
Unconscious Moderation works underneath the habit. The app uses guided hypnotherapy sessions, structured journaling, and daily movement to address the subconscious associations that make reaching for a drink feel like the obvious next thing. The journaling isn’t a diary. It’s built to surface what your brain is actually reaching for, so you can meet that need directly rather than through a substitute.
The program runs 90 days. At day 30, you choose your own direction: cut back, drink more intentionally, or stop altogether. The app treats both as equally valid outcomes. The point isn’t to follow a rule you set on a Sunday. It’s to understand the pattern well enough that whichever path you choose, you’re choosing it clearly.
The people who tend to get the most out of it are not in crisis. They’re the ones who have tried tracking apps and found the count drifting back up regardless. They know exactly how much they drink and why. The awareness just hasn’t moved the habit. At some point, the work needs to happen somewhere the count sheet can’t reach.
San Diego’s wellness culture already knows that surface numbers tell only part of the story. What you eat matters, but so does why. How much you sleep matters, but so does the quality. The same logic applies here.
Chemotherapy and radiation have long been considered gold standards of cancer treatment, but they can cause severe side effects. A promising new approach called theranostics—a combination of “therapeutics” and “diagnostics”—could offer patients with certain types of metastatic cancers new hope. It’s a two-step process that uses a drug that binds to specific receptors on cancer cells. Advanced imaging detects this radioisotope, allowing doctors to then use a second radioisotope that binds to the cancer cells and destroys them. Click here to learn more about how specialists at Scripps Cancer Center are using theranostics.
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Daniel A. Kaplan is a founding partner of Panakos LLP with more than three decades of civil litigation experience in both state and federal courts. Mr. Kaplan pursues and defends legal claims on behalf of companies, entrepreneurs, and business owners in high-stakes disputes. He focuses on business disputes including breach of contract, unfair competition, trade secret theft, securities disputes, fraud/misrepresentations, and employment matters.
“The best advocacy combines preparation, perspective, and a client relationship built on trust and candor.” — Daniel A. Kaplan
His clients include real estate investors, private and public corporations, and individuals seeking sophisticated legal counsel. Known for practical judgment and strategic advocacy, he works closely with an experienced and diverse legal team to protect, enforce, and defend his clients’ interests.
555 W. Beech Street, Ste. 500, San Diego, California 92101 619-8000-LAW Panakos.law
At Naumann Law Firm, PC, William Naumann and his team have recovered hundreds of millions of dollars in damages litigating construction defects, insurance, and government claims. Mr. Naumann has spent his career fighting for people in their hardest moments, from winning $7 million for homeowners after landslide damage to advocating for victims of 9/11.
“We always believe in working as hard as we can to maximize the recovery for the client.” — William Naumann, Esq.
Combining a personalized approach with a results-driven strategy, he’s helped homeowners associations, property owners, and individuals win against the largest developers, builders, insurers, and municipalities. His commitment is to secure the best possible results efficiently, whether through settlement or at trial.
10890 Thornmint Road, Suite 200, San Diego, California 92127 858-792-7474 naumannlegal.com
