 Good afternoon. My name is Sunny Lee. I see her pronouns and I have the honor to serve as your dean of students here at the University of California, Berkeley. Before we begin this event, we take a moment to recognize that Berkeley sits on the territory of who to the ancestral and unceded land of the to genuine alone. The successors of the historic and sovereign Verona band of Alameda County. This land was and continues to be of great importance to the alone people. We recognize that every member of the Berkeley community has and continues to benefit from the use and occupation of this land, since the institutions founded in 1868. Consistent with our values of community and diversity, we have a responsibility to acknowledge and make visible the university's relationship to native peoples. By offering this land acknowledgement, we affirm indigenous sovereignty and will work to hold University of California, Berkeley, more accountable to the needs of American Indian and indigenous peoples. We know that many of you are spread throughout the world on the land of other peoples and would like to take the time to acknowledge that ancestral history as well. I want to welcome all of our students, faculty, staff, parents, family members and friends as the dean of students have the joy and privilege of supporting the success of Cal students. We are joined today by students from around the globe undergraduate and graduate new and returning transfers and first year. Welcome all to the start of a new semester at the University of California Berkeley. It will be another unprecedented semester, but we will strive as an entire Cal community to make it the incredible educational experience that you deserve. We will begin our ceremony with a national anthem. We ask that you rise where you are, if you are able. Thank you. It is now my pleasure to introduce Chancellor Carol Christ. Chancellor Christ is the 11th Chancellor of the University, a celebrated scholar of Victorian literature. Chancellor Christ is also well known as an advocate for quality accessible public higher education, a proponent of the value of a broad education in the local arts and sciences, and a champion of women's issues and diversity on college campuses. Chancellor Christ. Thank you, Sunny. Hello, my name is Carol Christ and as Chancellor I have the great pleasure of formally welcoming you to the University of California at Berkeley. We're delighted to have you join us. Like the campus community as a whole you're a diverse group from a wide array of backgrounds with a stunning variety of academic and extracurricular interests. For some of you this represents the beginning of your journey in higher education, while many of you were here after two years of hard successful work at other colleges and universities. Yet you all have something powerful and important in common, despite the challenges and hardships of these difficult days, you have all persevered. You have by virtue of your presence here today cast a vote of confidence in yourselves in the continued value and relevance of a world class education and in us. And so on behalf of our university. I want to tell you that we're honored and humbled by the choice that you've made by your determination and your presence, whether it be virtual physical or some combination of the two. Today you're joining a resilient Cal community that has come together in order to confront the unprecedented challenges presented by the pandemic. We're proud to have developed and implemented our plans through an equity lens to ensure that we're doing everything in our power to provide equity of experience for all our students. Bears Protect Bears public health initiative has been extraordinarily successful. Members of our community who remain on or near the campus have done a remarkably good job adhering to the essential guidelines regarding masks distancing and hygiene. Our staff have continued to do what they must to sustain the and support the excellence and scope of our academic programs, as well as the services we offer to help your academic success and well being. Our alumni have contributed tens of millions of dollars to support students who have struggled in the face of the pandemics challenges. The faculty have to develop pedagogical muscles they never knew they had finding new and innovative ways to convey knowledge and love of learning virtually through a screen. And you, our students have been teaching us all along the way about the irrepressible passion you bring to your education no matter the circumstances, teaching us about what it means to have an unquenchable thirst for knowledge and enlightenment. Make no mistake. I'm not here to tell you that the pandemic is a blessing in disguise. I would give anything to be together with you today in real time in a real place. I like you long for a return to normalcy for a time when zoom was not yet a noun. Masks were put away after Halloween and social distancing was a polite way to avoid people we weren't particularly fond of. I mourn for those we've lost for those were leaving behind. I'm disturbed and animated by the social inequities that the pandemic has exposed and amplified. I'm determined to confront the unsettling politicization of science and the willful spread of fiction and falsehoods masquerading as the truth. And now after the horrific events in the nation's capital on January 6, I share with millions of Americans, Democrats and Republicans alike, a deep concern for the future of our democracy and civil society. We now as a campus community and as a country must come together and make clear in no uncertain terms that we cannot tolerate violence. We will not accept disregard for our Constitution. And we must redouble our efforts to do everything in our power to identify and eliminate racism, wherever it may be found on our campus in our community and across our country. These overlapping crises make our mission, our purpose as a public research university, all the more essential. Now more than ever, humanity needs people who believe in science in the notion of a greater good, injustice, equity, diversity, inclusiveness, and the truth. And these of course are the very values that form the foundation of all that Berkeley is and stands for. It was 15 years ago that our students, faculty, staff and alumni came together to create UC Berkeley's principles of community. Together they serve as an affirmation of the intrinsic and unique value of each member of our community, and as a guide for our personal and collective behavior. While I frequently refer to these principles and messages to the campus and speeches I give, I have never until now felt compelled to read them aloud. I do so today, not just as a way of explaining who we are to you, our newest members, not simply because I fervently hope you will embrace and adopt them as your own. I wish to share them because they so powerfully reflect what we seek to embody and model for the world around us, a world that can benefit from these principles now more than ever. These principles of community are rooted in our mission of teaching research and public service. They reflect our passion for critical inquiry, debate, discovery and innovation, and our deep commitment to contributing to a better world. From today onward you too have a role in sustaining a safe care and humane environment in which the following principles can thrive. We place honesty and integrity in our teaching learning research and administration at the highest level. We recognize the intrinsic relationship between diversity and excellence in all our endeavors. We affirm the dignity of all individuals and strive to uphold a just community in which discrimination and hate are not tolerated. We're committed to ensuring freedom of expression and dialogue that elicits the full spectrum of views held by our varied communities. We respect the differences as well as the commonalities that bring us together and call for civility and respect and our personal interactions. We believe that active participation and leadership in addressing the most pressing issues facing our local and global communities are central to our educational mission. We embrace open and equitable access to opportunities for learning and development as our obligation and goal. We're living in a historic moment when things are shifting around us in ways that will have a profound impact on the future. Yet over the course of the last 10 months I've seen those signs of defeat and despair in the Cal community. It's not only a perilous time, but so too is it a time of creative ferment and possibility. We have before us extraordinary individual and collective opportunities to extract profound meeting and valuable lessons learned from all that we're witnessing and experiencing. Berkeley is our belief in and commitment to individual and institutional agency. The notion that through the discovery, development, dissemination and discussion of knowledge, we can make the world a better place. You're in the right place. Despite the limitations imposed by the pandemic, I urge you to take full advantage of all that is on offer. You can and will stimulate and energize the entire university and we're thrilled to have you shape this campus, even as it shapes you. I believe there's no false optimism in my conviction that this virus will be vanquished, that there will be a day after. I was thrilled to announce earlier this week that we're planning for a return to in-person instruction system-wide in fall 2021. I believe that Berkeley and all of you are uniquely equipped to meet the demands and opportunities of these times. And I know there's no place that I would rather be physically or virtually. Welcome to Berkeley. Fiat Lux and Go Bears. Thank you Chancellor Christ for your clear and powerful words and your most exemplary leadership. We're so fortunate that you are leading us through these historical moments. You continue to inspire me, all of us to persevere even in the most challenging times. This speaker is one of Cal's fantastic faculty. Professor Martha Alney is a teaching professor and undergraduate chair in the Department of Economics. She received her PhD from Berkeley and has been a faculty member here for over 28 years. It's clear that she is passionate about teaching and cares deeply about our students and our university. Hi y'all. Nice to meet you. I wish I could see you in person. I'm Martha Alney. I'm a teaching professor of economics here at the University of California at Berkeley. And on behalf of the faculty, let me welcome you to UC Berkeley. You are now a golden bear. Congratulations. These are interesting times. Boy, what a crazy time to start college, you know. So I'm going to give you some advice that's timeless. That's the same advice I would give you any semester. And I'm going to give you some advice that I think is relevant to this particular semester. So here we go. Number one, don't give up. Don't give up. Don't give up. Coming to Berkeley, especially, you know, I work with a lot of transfer students because about 30% of our econ majors are transfer students. Transfer students especially, but spring admits generally, it's a really challenging thing to start the university in January. Because all of your classmates have been here for a semester if you're a four-year student or for a couple of years if you're a transfer student, and they've already gotten the hang of the place. This step up to Berkeley is a big step. It is. It's just, it's a step. And it can be discouraging and there's going to be times. There's going to be times when you mess up and you land on your butt. And what I want to say to you is you got to get up. You got to get up and you got to keep going. Don't give up. Don't give up. We want you here. Berkeley is challenging. Yes, Berkeley is challenging, but don't give up. We can do this. We're here for you. We want to help you. We don't want you to go away. We want you to be here. We want you to get your degree from Berkeley. We want to be your faculty. We want you to be our students. You belong here. So don't give up. Don't give up. Don't give up. That's number one. You belong here takes me to number two. You are not an imposter. You're not an imposter. We didn't make a mistake. You belong here. Even if you mess up that first midterm and even if you mess up that first midterm, we didn't make a mistake. We didn't make a mistake. You belong here. You are not an imposter. This is where you're supposed to be. We are so glad that you're here. Oh my gosh, we're so glad you're here. You are a Berkeley student. You're a Golden Bear. You belong here. Let that imposter syndrome creep into your head. If it does start to creep into your head, just push it out. That imposter syndrome, throw it out. Put it over there on the garbage heap. You're here. We want you here. You're not an imposter. This is where you're supposed to be. We didn't make a mistake. Number one was don't give up. Number two was that imposter syndrome. Throw it away. Number three, you can do this. You can do it. You can do this. It's going to be a lot of work. It's going to be a lot of work. You're going to work hard and probably you're going to work harder than you've ever worked before in your life. But boy, are you going to learn things? I mean, oh my goodness. Yeah. Okay. You're going to learn the things that you already know. You're going to learn. You have a little list. You know, these are the classes I want to take and these are the things I want to learn and you're going to learn those things. But you're going to learn things that you don't know right now that are the things that you're going to learn and that are just going to blow your mind open. And those things are going to transform you and make you into a different person, somebody other than who you thought you were going to be. It's an amazing, amazing place and you can do it. You can do this. This is a fabulous Berkeley is a fabulous experience if you let yourself have that experience. You can do this. You will work hard. You will. You will grow in so many ways and you can do it. So those are my three pieces of advice that are my timeless pieces. Don't give up. Don't give up. Don't give up even if you land on your butt. Get up. Get yourself up. Brush yourself off. Start all over again. Number two, you are not an imposter. Number three, you can do this. All right. Now, spring 2021. Wow. What a crazy time to be starting college. Oh my goodness gracious. We got a pandemic. We got an economic crisis. We got a racial justice reckoning. Now we got a political crisis. Something about Wednesdays in January. It's just kind of unsettling around here. We got a lot. I probably forgot one. There's probably another crisis that I completely forgot about. I don't know. There's just a lot going on. There's a lot going on. So number one in this particular moment in spring 21, you've got to practice self care. It is so important this semester that you practice self care. You've got to find ways to take care of yourself. You've got to do it. So I don't know what that is for you. Maybe it's exercise for me. It's going for long walks. Maybe it's exercise. Maybe it's meditation. Maybe it's prayer. Whatever works yoga books, read a novel, pick up a novel and read a novel get don't do scroll anymore. Pick up a novel and read a novel, but you've got to figure out what the things are that are your things that you do for yourself that self care, and you've got to make that a priority. Because right now this world is just crazy. And it's too much. It's too much for any of us. And so every one of us has to find ways of practicing self care in order to manage all of these things that are coming at us right right now. So number one for this moment is practice self care. Number two, you need to find or form your community. Now, maybe I don't know if Victoria is going to talk about the club process that let me tell you from the faculty perspective. I find the club process around here really kind of like, Wow, I've been here like 2829 years and I'm still working on understanding the club process. So what happens with the clubs is the student clubs, they have, they have their information session in the first couple of weeks of the semester and that's the meetings that they have where they tell about the club and you go and you say oh yeah I wouldn't join that club. And then you sign up and then you're in the club and then after the info sessions are over. It's almost like they're closed, like they figured out who's in the club and those are the people in the club for that semester. And so if you're sitting there going oh you know I'm just starting at Berkeley and I'm just trying to find my way around I got to get the zoom thing figured out I got to get the right. I'll get to the clubs in week four. Yeah, it's too late. You can't wait till week four to get to the clubs. You got to get the club thing underway right away. So what you want to do is you want to go on the ASUC site. And there's a listing of all the student organizations, and there's links for every one of them and you can follow those links and you can find your student organizations and there's so many of them and economics we have five. You have five student organizations just in my department. So there are so many different student organizations, find some, and go and join them. You know, you may, you may go and you may join one this semester and you may go after a little while you may go, these are not my people. That's okay. It's all right. You know, so try a different club next semester or try to try three so that you can like say, well, I'm not going to go to that one anymore but I love this other one, but you need to find your community. It's always important to try to find your community here at Berkeley, but boy in this pandemic semester when things are on zoom and the clubs are all meeting but they're meeting on zoom is so important, please don't isolate yourself it's part of that self care thing. You've got to find, you got to find your community and, and do that. So number one for this particular time that we're living through practice self care, number two find and form your community number three practice self care is so important I put it on there twice. Practice self care. Alright, well, that's my advice. So my timeless advice was don't give up, don't give up, don't give up. Even if you don't give up, don't give up, don't give up number two, you are not an imposter. You're not an imposter. We didn't make a mistake you're supposed to be here you are not an imposter number three, you can do this, you can you can you can you can do this. Number one, number two, number three. And for this particular semester practice self care, find your community practice self care. All right, shall you be well, stay safe. And as always, go bears. Thank you, Professor only. I think that's great advice, not just for students but for everyone including me. I'm going to remember those. We will now turn our focus to some of the resources available to you from our dedicated staff and my great colleagues. Our next speaker this morning, or this afternoon is Cal's assistant vice chancellor and director of admissions. Femi open deli who has some words of welcome to share with you. Femi. Good afternoon, Golden Bear family. It is my distinct honor to welcome you all today and thank you all for joining us. I'm incredibly excited to be here in front of you all today and you should all take pride in knowing that you all distinguish yourselves amongst more than 108,000 applicants to Berkeley this year. And you are now here to write your chapter in the story history of this great institution. This is a time that is more than a moment in our history with so much racial and political division in our nation with protests in our communities as calls for justice and equity grow louder by the day. I speak for the entire Berkeley community when I say you all have arrived right on time. For many of us 2021 has already been a trying year. I think to the words of Stacy Abrams who said remember in the darkest moments, when the work doesn't seem worth it. It's just out of reach out of our willingness to push through comes tremendous power. Use it. You all are you all join a cohort of entering scholars that that are among some of the most diverse scholars in the last three decades you see Berkeley specifically as welcoming more black and Latinx scholars than in recent history. Many of you are coming from more than 84 countries nearly every state across the nation and county in California. Of course I need to shout out all of my graduates from Bay Area high schools and California Community Colleges in this admitted class. Some of these students have already started this fall, but the scholarly community here Berkeley is not complete without each and every one of you joining us today. Many of the students here are the first in their family to go to college. Many of them might be like me, the child of an immigrant. Many of the students here at the College of Scholars not only diverse, but they are excellent by every measure. They have built strong leadership skills through clubs jobs and honest societies have logged substantial hours of community service and overcome incredible challenges, both inside and outside the classroom. James Baldwin once said, you have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not with not with its idea of you. We had a very best entering college this year, and we have we had an extraordinary pool of talented students but in the end, we were looking for all of you. Collectively you begin your journey at the world's best public flagship. Berkeley has a long legacy of creating future leaders, alums that impact the world and current students that do not wait their turn to address the problems they see in our society. We get up and they go for it every single day. I am confident this class will include people who are ready to meet these problems, create new knowledge and make our society a better place. We know that together, we will change the lives of millions of people here in California and around the world. So whatever you are driven to pursue, drive towards it with all of your passion, effort and commitment. The University of Berkeley is going to continue to be exciting and revolutionary. You're joining a scholarly community that is finding their moment to make their mark on the world. Your experience at Berkeley will be rewarding and provide you an opportunity to grow and stretch your minds and perspectives. Yes, your time at Berkeley will be many things. But as you've heard today, it will not be easy. You will be challenged here. You will be tested by our faculty and by your peers. There are intellectual clashes and spirited debates. You will find yourself in these moments changed and fortified in your own beliefs. Chancellor Kristen Berkeley family, I am pleased to present to you our spring admins, the most diverse and recent history, as academically excellent as our tradition. And I look forward to the many contributions they will make as they set their sights to greatness and leaving their legacy as California Golden Bears. Thank you all. Welcome home and go Bears. Thank you so much for me to you and your team for admitting the most excellent and diverse class ever. Next it is my privilege to introduce Cruz Grimeldo. She's the assistant vice chancellor and director of financial aid and scholarships, nearly two thirds of undergraduate students qualify for financial aid. I know I will not have gone through my own college education without the important grants that were available to me. Cruz manages a team responsible for just reading over $725 million to Cal students. Cruz. Feliz año nuevo. Congratulations and welcome to Berkeley. My name is Cruz Grimeldo and I'm the assistant vice chancellor and director of financial aid and scholarships. Also supporting Cal Student Central, our one stop shop for financial aid, building and enrollment questions. Welcome here. Welcome home where mi casa es tu casa and where you belong and where you are Berkeley. I love Berkeley. It transformed my life from student to staff member and as our and as you are here with us today, please trust that it will transform yours. And as we look at current events and our world today, we need creative innovative empathetic students just like you to help solve these complex problems and imagine a brighter future. We are so thankful and excited that you are here with us. I'm delighted that we chose you and I'm honored that you chose us. Berkeley is home to world renowned faculty, brilliant students like you and a caring staff in in a life affirming environment and one of the most vibrant cities in the world, and our purpose is to support you. Also, I help keep the campus focused on our guiding mission of transforming lives through scholarship, and we do that by ensuring that you have the resources to cover your food, rent, tuition, books, health insurance and other personal expenses. And that has been our charge for over 150 years. Financial Aid and Scholarships is a founding equity program on our campus, and we help build a diverse community of scholars from a wide array of economic backgrounds. Most students as I mentioned received some form of financial aid, and it is our goal to provide robust support to you, so that you can thrive as a student graduate and be proud of your investment. After Financial Aid and Scholarships, I want you to know that a Berkeley education is attainable, invaluable and infinitely bountiful. We also care deeply about you and your families, and I know that these are hard times. Our diverse team of professionals are here to support you every step of the way as you obtain a world-class education. And I'm so proud that we have amazing staff in student affairs, equity and inclusion, undergraduate education across all the schools and colleges, and many members behind the scenes in finance, administration and development who are all committed to your success. While hundreds of thousands of students come through our doors, we hold sacred our responsibility as advisors to provide you with accurate, credible guidance attuned to your specific needs. Your scholarly development and growth is utmost. As student development professionals, we prioritize your empowerment and agency, and support you as you strive towards your academic goals, and even more importantly, as you cultivate your holistic wellness. We want to partner with you, and we are here for you, and we truly have your back. Thank you so much, Cruz, to you and your team for changing the trajectory of generations to come. Next, it is my honor to introduce Dr. Guy Nicolette, the Assistant Vice Chancellor for University Health Services. As you can imagine, he has been a crucial part of UC Berkeley's response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Guy. Hi, welcome all to Cal. As the Chancellor said in her opening remarks, this campus has had a really thoughtful and multi-layered response to COVID-19 and way more than I can detail in two or three minutes. But I wanted to say that I'm very proud of our innovation and taking really the opportunities along with the hardships that the pandemic has presented. My vision for UHS, and frankly for the campus, is to have a campus that actually makes you healthier. And it's been a bit challenging in the pandemic, but we've tested over 100,000 UCB affiliates with about 20,000 unique students, faculty, and staff. We've done contact tracing, isolation and quarantine on site, wastewater testing, and now today is day one of our vaccine deployment. So I'm very excited about, you know, seeing the light at the end of the tunnel of this pandemic. We've got a lot of work to do, but today is truly a historic day for campus during the pandemic. There will be links for all of you, I think in either in the Facebook chat or connected to this event that gets you straight to our dashboards and COVID information and the information from University Health. I won't go into that. But I want you all to hear this, that we also remain available for and mindful of the ongoing physical and mental health challenges that predated COVID or maybe were exacerbated by the pandemic. And like Professor Alney said, we strongly advocate your self care and your care for your community. And I guess as an aside, I want to avoid recommending using the term social distancing. I know it's become part of our lexicon. But I hope we all start to replace that with physical distancing, because the social aspect of being a campus being a student at Cal, and frankly just being a human, we are social. I really want to emphasize how critical that is to not only your just general well being, but but to your academic success here. Lastly, I want to say that, you know, even though we invested heavily and early in testing and contact tracing. This has played an incredibly important role to keep our positivity rate far lower than the state or national average. What's more effective than contact tracing and testing, frankly is wearing a mask, washing your hands, staying physically distant. So really our social norms campaign was was one critical way that the campus has responded. I'll say in true, excellent Berkeley fashion. So I hope you all keep keep that in mind and welcome to Cal. Thank you guy to you and your team for keeping us healthy and safe through some challenging times. And now we have a short video about our standards of community that we ask all our golden bears to adhere to no matter where you are in the world. But particularly if you find yourself physically on campus this semester. Can't wait to get back to campus. Wear a mask. Can't wait to get back to class. Can't wait to get back to the lab. Wear a mask. Wear a mask. All bears should be fighting this virus. Bears protect bears. Bears protect bears. Bears protect bears. Bears protect bears. Osos protegenosos. Wear a mask. Save a life. Let us unite as one community. Bears protect bears. Final speaker of today's ceremony is your ASUC president or associated students of the University of California, your campus student government. This year's president is Victoria Vera, a fourth year political science major who identifies as a first generation EOP Chicana feminist president Victoria. Thank you so much Sunny. Good afternoon UC Berkeley. It is such an honor to be here with you today. I'm during spring convocation and to welcome you to the golden bear family. Spring convocation holds a special place in my heart as when I was admitted to UC Berkeley, I was initially wait listed, but then I was admitted to join the spring class that entered my first year. Spring convocation for me was the first time I was in the space with my fellow golden bears and to actually see my community. Something that has stuck with me since my spring convocation was, no matter how you enter UC Berkeley, no matter what your pathway was, you were selected for a reason. UC Berkeley has some of the most competitive applicants across the UC system. You were selected for your merits, but more than that, who you are as an individual and what you can bring to the UC Berkeley community. So no matter what your pathway was into UC Berkeley, this is now your community. More than ever, our community and our world needs and is looking for innovative and dynamic leaders across many fields. I encourage you all, but more importantly, I want to empower you all to develop and cultivate the community you want to see here at UC Berkeley. You do not need permission and you do not need to wait your time to make the change you want to see on our campus. Our community that comes here to UC Berkeley come with a wide range of lived experiences and broad world perspectives. These experiences have informed our community's passion and advocacy, but also how it prevails during times of uncertainty. Your authenticity and your resiliency is powerful. Do not be afraid to shine your light because when you do, you allow others subconsciously to do the same. I am so excited to welcome you all to UC Berkeley and I'm so excited to see what you'll accomplish during your time here and the impact that we will have together. So my Golden Bears, good luck on this upcoming semester. It may keep your resiliency during these tough times. Go Bears. Thank you President Victoria for representing some of the very best of our Berkeley students. It's an honor to work with you. Thank you all for joining us for new student convocation ceremony, although we cannot all be together in person. It's still an honor to be able to share the campus community with you. To our new students participating in all that Golden Bear orientation has to offer. Enjoy your time and make those connections with your departments, groups and organizations that will help you thrive here at Cal. And remember Dr. Olney's really good advice and all that she had to share today with us. The next event is the Transfer Student Center Welcome. Check your schedule for the details and link or ask your orientation leader for help with any GBO questions. To our newest Golden Bears welcome and to our returning ones welcome back and go Bears. To everyone. We wish you a pleasant and healthy start to the new semester. Ceremonies at the University of California traditionally conclude with Hail to California, the University Alma Mater. Today's performance is from Decadence Acapella. Please join in in singing and go Bears. Hail to California, joyful Golden Day for