 Welcome everyone. Hi. Before we begin today's event, we want to take a moment to recognize that Berkeley sits on the territory of the Hushan, the ancestral and unceded land of the Shishenio Alloni, the successors of the historic and sovereign Verona Band of Alameda County. This land was and continues to be of great importance to the Alloni people. We recognize that every member of the Berkeley community has benefited from the use and occupation of this land since the institution's founding 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 we'll work to hold University of California, Berkeley more accountable to the needs of American Indian indigenous peoples. We know that many of you are spread throughout the world on the land of other peoples and we would like to take the time to acknowledge that ancestral history as well. So for those of you who are learning who I am, my name is Aidan Walker. I am a junior here at Berkeley. My major is conservation and resource studies at the College of Natural Resources. My concentration is in constitutional law and food systems. I love it, it's wonderful. And something that I love about Cal is the culture. As you can see, I'm part of the rally committee and a big part of our job is promoting the culture. We had a rally earlier today, we had a rally last night and we're gonna have another rally tonight. And I just love it. It's so much fun. I highly encourage all of you to come and see it. And stemming off of that, I would like to extend the message of gratitude to all of our donors. Everything that we do could not be done without you, especially my favorite part of the rallies. So thank you. So now I have the wonderful honor of introducing our chancellor. Carol T. Christ began her term as Berkeley's 11th chancellor in 2017. A celebrated scholar of Victorian literature, she is also known as an advocate for high caliber, accessible public, higher education, and a champion of women's issues and diversity on college campuses. Chris spent more than three decades as a professor and administrator at Berkeley before serving as president of Smith College. At Cal, she works to foster community and prove the campus climate for people of all backgrounds, celebrate the institution's longstanding commitment to free speech, strengthen Berkeley's financial position, address the housing shortage, and develop a 10-year strategic plan for the campus. Please welcome me, join me in welcoming Chancellor Chris. Thank you. Thank you. It's wonderful to welcome you here to a conversation that I'm very much looking forward to. It's a joy to introduce you to one of the most exciting transformational initiatives happening on campus today, Berkeley's Discovery. Launched in 2020, this effort aims to ensure that every undergraduate can pursue projects beyond the classroom that cultivate their deeper talents and passions. This initiative was founded in ways to strengthen our undergraduate experience at Berkeley by reinforcing the ties between the academic environment in the classroom and the real world outside. And the important for this is so that we better prepare our students for the future and to prepare them to be lifelong learners. So we all know how to do this. There's two pieces to it. The first piece is to make sure that our students have lots of extracurricular activities with lots of experiential learning experiences built into that. We are currently working on doing that. We have a new Discovery Hub that was just implemented this past year. We're adding new opportunities to it every week. And our goal is that every unit, there's over 100 departments, hundreds of research labs and hundreds of units affiliated with the university that they will give us their experiences for our students and that all our students will go to this place to find the experiences they need to make this experience at Berkeley as rich as possible for them. The second thing we're doing is we're working with instructors to try and improve their classrooms so that instructors will have more intellectually engaged in material in their classrooms, that their classrooms are more inclusive and that also the connections between what the students are learning in the classroom and outside are also fortified as well. So this is a huge project. It started in 2020. It's something that we're very proud of and we're something that we're very, very excited about and it's something that we feel that the need for it continues to grow every day. So I'm joined here today by four students and if you pardon me while I put on my glasses, middle ages is not kind. First, let me welcome Fira Fatemah who graduated last spring in astrophysics. As a student, she participated in research on supernova at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab under the supervision of Dr. Saul Perlmutter who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2011. She now helps develop educational programs and trains facilitators at the Lawrence Hall of Science which is right up the hill. You can see it is this concrete building. It's an icon for all families in the Bay Area. Everybody goes there as children and it's one of the hallmark pictures is to get a picture of the whale with the Golden Gate Bridge in the background. Next, we are joined by Dominic Wittz who is a second year student in the College of Letters and Sciences. He's participated in the Berkeley Connect mentoring program and volunteered as an orientation leader. He is also active in the Orthodox Christian Fellowship and is a student lead in Berkeley Dining. He's going to continue to explore a plethora of classes until he declares his major. Ruby King is a third year student in psychology and Native American studies. She works at Cafe Aloni and is a Fiat Lux scholar and a Berkeley Hope scholar. As a member of the Karuka and Yukor tribes of Northern California, she is interned for its natural resources department as well as helping organize prescribed burns in the remote climate mountains. Stephanie Cuarez is a third year student in data science and cognition. She's a violinist for Mariachi Luz Del Oro and a database assistant for the Student Discovery Hub that I mentioned a minute ago. As an intern, she's developing innovative methods for measuring diversity in films. Her experiences as a first-gen Latina student has fueled her passion for expanding opportunities that nurture students' potential. So I'm gonna start with a few questions for the students and then you're welcome to join in with your own questions. So, Fira, can you tell us about your research you pursued as an undergraduate? Yes. Now, is it? Yes, it's working. Okay, great. Hi everyone, as mentioned, I'm Fira and throughout my time at Cal, I graduated a few months ago, back in May, but when I was here, I pursued two research experiences. The first one was with the Space Sciences Laboratory or SSL, it's also up in the hill. I worked with Dr. Solene Lejeune where I was studying the Van Allen radiation belt and if you don't know what that is, it's essentially like a region within the Earth's magnetic field where there's a lot of like high energy particles but the thing is like we don't know how to like best model that area. So when satellites have to kind of fly through that region around the Earth, they can like run into technical issues when like the high energy particles hit the satellites and so my research was trying to find ways to better model, to better parameterize the Van Allen radiation belt and I worked on that research since like my second semester of my sophomore year until the summer right before my senior year, so it's about a year and I was fortunate enough to be able to publish a paper on that research. I was the first author paper on the Journal of Geophysical Research Space Sciences so I'm very grateful for the opportunity and then the second research I pursued after I finished that one was with Dr. Sol Per Mudder who was the 2011 Nobel Prize winner in physics and that was with the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and for that research in particular I was helping them study supernovae. Essentially that's when stars reach the end of their life and they go kaboom and because of this, because they're really bright we can actually use them to measure distances and also measure the age of the universe. So I was essentially working with like the data of all the supernovae spectra and I was trying to find a way if like if the data is super noisy and it has a lot of just interference in the data like how much I can still retrieve information back out of that data. So that was the work that I was working on after I graduated. I still work on that research for a little bit but I finished it very recently like the end of September and so now I'm continuing my work as a facilitator coach at the Lawrence Hall of Science. So yeah, that's the work that I've been doing it's been great and I'm very grateful to have all of these research opportunities during my time here. Thank you. Yeah. So Dominic, we hope each student's discovery journey at Berkeley includes a connection with an immersion in exciting opportunities inside and outside the classroom. So could you describe how your experience in Berkeley Connect has helped you to find your community and explore potential majors and perhaps if you could give a little bit of background on Berkeley Connect that would be wonderful too. Yeah, of course, Oliver. So Berkeley Connect is essentially a program that a number of different disciplines offer here at Cal in which graduate students acting as mentors will meet with small groups of students usually around 20, yeah, I wanna say 20 or less and they'll kind of mentor them. So that's for both like first years and transfer students especially and there'll just be like weekly meetings, maybe like discussions on the topic at hand. So I did Berkeley Connect twice in English. So we talk about maybe like editing, revising. One time we had a game night, another time we went to go see a play at the Berkeley repository theater, which is a lot of fun. And so I think Berkeley Connect has been great because not only has it helped me kind of find a smaller niche within the larger UC Berkeley community because in a school of 30 to 40,000 students it's a lot to kind of juggle like trying to navigate all of these things. So Berkeley Connect has been great for like kind of helping me focus on like a smaller part of the community. For instance, like there are some students from like my Berkeley Connect English classes that I'll still see in some of my other classes which is really fun. Like for my English 45 C class I have another student who it's like, I'm like, oh yeah, I remember you from Berkeley Connect. And so that just makes the university feel a little bit smaller. And yeah, I think, and then also with graduate students too. So fostering relationships and getting advice from students have kind of tread that path before it can be very helpful. Whether that's like just with like life stuff with like student discounts or just with like a larger things like jobs and other community things. So Berkeley Connect's been invaluable for that I think. And I definitely highly recommend it. And it actually did get its start in the English department. So I'm especially proud that I was in that sector of Berkeley Connect. But they're all I'm sure great. Yeah. So how many students are in Berkeley Connect? Like total or like in one? In one pod. Oh yeah, in one pod. So it can kind of like vary. I know I had one that had like less than 10. And then another, that was when I did it with like transfer students and another that I did with like mostly first years. And that one was like larger. I think around 20 to 25. But still like way smaller than like your larger lectures. And you can do stuff on like a smaller like seminar scale. And it's just really fun. It's a lot of fun like community building activities and whatnot. Thank you. You're welcome. So Stephanie, you're a student in one of our new majors. And we, this year we're forming a new college, the first college for the 50 years in the history of Berkeley. It's a computing data science and society. It's the big hole that you see on the southwest side of campus. That's gonna become this extraordinary building in the next three years. Could you talk to us a little bit about why you chose this field of study? Yeah, can everyone hear me? Okay, cool. Yeah, so actually it's kind of a funny story. I originally came in as an intended film studies major, which is pretty different to what I'm currently pursuing. I mean, data science in a lot of ways is more technical. And there's a lot of computation involved. And it's a pretty demanding major compared to film studies. You know, I love both, but yeah. It's a lot more demanding. But I originally took data A because I wanted to get more exposure to things other than film. And that's when I really realized that I enjoy learning about the world through data. And, you know, data is kind of this journey of learning about the world. And, you know, it's so complicated in different ways. I mean, data science is kind of engraved, engraved, not the right word, but it's like in every crevice of our lives, it's like an everyday decision making. Like we process information about the data and the world around us. And it was just really interesting and I wanted to learn more about it. Yeah. And so how did you find it? Sorry? When you enrolled here, what were your first set of classes? Yeah, so I was taking mostly writing classes, you know, completing my general recs at first. But I realized that, you know, data science was such a, you know, big culture here and like computer science and data science. And I didn't want to just limit myself to learning about film because, you know, films are great and I love learning about films, but, you know, there's just so much more at Berkeley that I wanted to explore. And yeah. Thank you. Thank you. So Ruby, how have you cultivated a sense of belonging on campus? And does it make it easier to connect with extracurricular activities? Hey everybody, my name is Ruby. Is it off? We can't hear you. Hello, can you guys hear me this time? No. Okay. Is it good now? Can everybody hear? Okay. Hey everybody, my name is Ruby. So I have cultivated a sense of community here on campus through the organizations I'm in. So as Oliver mentioned, I am a Berkeley Hope Scholar. I'm a native student and I'm also a Fiat Lux Scholar. Through those organizations, I've been able to create large networks of really great people that have helped me. And during my time here at Cal through like some trials and tribulations I've had, I lost my grandma first semester here and it was really difficult, but through those communities, they really helped me get through it. And also with that being said, they have also connected me to a lot of extracurricular opportunities through the Fiat Lux Scholarship in particular. They have a faculty mentorship program. And through that, I was connected with two different professors for both of my majors. And both of them are really great and have connected me to really wonderful opportunities that I wouldn't have without the program. Thank you very much. So Stephanie, you're a member of a mariachi band. So could you talk to us about how that's enriched your Berkeley experience? It's not working. Okay, there we go. All right, yeah. So being part of the mariachi has been one of the most fulfilling things for me here at Berkeley. You know, at the same time, it's like I'm expanding my artistic horizons and representing my culture. Which are two of the biggest things. You know, it's part of my identity and it's the two biggest things that I mentioned to anyone that I come across. It's really helped me become more confident and a better communicator in ways I never really expected. It's really helped me hone my emotional intelligence because art is just a different, it's completely different to data science and I think it's important to have both an emotional and more artistic side to kind of, you know, such a technical major. But it's been a great experience and it's honestly a privilege to perform for the Berkeley community just because, you know, I'm able to, you know, get something out of it and I'm able to, you know, give people that privilege of, you know, if you don't have a space here or you don't have your culture here, it's, you know, that mariachi, being part of the mariachi and performing for everyone kind of gives them that space to be comfortable and, yeah. Thank you. So Ruby, could you talk a little bit about how your experiences before coming to Berkeley shaped your time here? Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay. So my experiences prior to Berkeley actually is exactly what shaped what I wanted to major in here. I came in to Berkeley knowing that I wanted to do psychology. I grew up in a predominantly native town and with that I learned so much like rich traditional knowledge and I grew up in such a beautiful place and I'm so grateful for that. But I also seen a lot of struggles. So deciding to major in psychology was wanting to understand that struggle and to go back to my community after getting my degree to help help my people, to like deciding to major in Native American studies was a little bit different. I wanted to minor when I came in and I didn't decide to major until my sophomore year. Like I said, I lost my grandma first semester here and that was something that impacted me really deeply. She was actually the person that had raised me. So losing her was like losing my mom and she just had such a huge impact and influence on me as a person that she had gone to UC Davis and graduated in 1978 and she graduated with a degree in Native American studies and a minor in art. She did this right after the implementation of the Native American studies programs in the UC system in the wake of the red power in the civil rights movement. And I think just the influence that she had on my life that was something that I also wanted to carry on with me. So in a way it was kind of like carrying on her legacy. Thank you. My condolences. So for Dominic, Dominic you belong to an Orthodox Christian Fellowship and have participated in various clubs. Could you, one of the things we were trying to do the discovery initiative is to have this synergy between your classroom experiences and your extracurricular experiences and to try and make better connections between those two. So could you talk to us a little bit about how your extracurricular activities complement your studies? Yeah, of course. So let's see, where do I start? I think I'll begin like, I've always kind of had an interest in doing either English literature or like history or something that had to do with like reading, writing. Like I can do math, but math is not my strong suit. And so I think a lot of it for me was, a lot of like religious faith and like from whatever background you come from is kind of thinking about the past. And so, and there's lots of different ways you can explore that through both like history and literature. And so one of the things that I found meaningful was like being able to take history classes that kind of explore a little bit about like regions where Easter orthodoxy kind of developed further. So for instance, I'm currently taking a class on the Russian autocracy, which is fairly outmoded, but like religious faith is like an interesting like kind of undercurrent within that region. And so the hope is like by better understanding history and the things that kind of surround it, the better understanding I can have of like my own religious background. And I think that can be true for anybody regardless of like what kind of path you're kind of walking on. And so yeah, I'm also taking like another like Slavic comparative literature class examining literature and revolution. So during the kind of communist era right now we're looking at like 1917. So the February and October revolutions. And that's really interesting because at this time where you have kind of like different political actions and change, religion is still kind of sometimes an undercurrent there because it's so ingrained in Russian culture. And so I think a lot of those things like my background kind of then ends up informing what classes I end up deciding to take. But I think it's, you know, important to mix things up a little bit. So also just taking classes in like English literature, which is heavily like Western Christian or maybe even agnostic is also helpful for kind of changing and shaking that perspective. And I hope to do that further with other history classes I take and kind of to just broaden the scope of things that I know. Yeah, does that answer your question? Yes, it does. Thank you, Dominic. You're welcome. My next set of questions are not specifically for any of you, whichever you would like to answer them. So the first question, I think everyone comes when they have come to a campus and have their undergraduate years, there are things that they've discovered about themselves that were sometimes are sort of surprising actually. So could you talk a little bit about something that you discovered in your time here that surprised you? Academic? I think, I guess, I know I just said that I'd always had like an interest in doing reading and writing but I was surprised that I enjoyed history as much as I did it when I entered college because one of the unique things about approaching history at the kind of undergraduate level versus like the high school, middle school or even like I don't know, elementary school level is that so much of history is kind of subjective. It's kind of like filtered through these specific lenses and that's oftentimes through the background of the professor. And taking high school history, a lot of like classes have certain curricula that you have to follow and so there's not necessarily as much flexibility and you don't necessarily get to hear that kind of personal voice. And so that, I don't know, that was something that surprised me about myself that like I was still interested in history because it ended up being like so personal. And then I guess like on another note, like I guess I also learned you can't continually function on like six hours of sleep. You do need to get sleep. That is important. But yeah, academically and also personally, yeah. Yeah, I agree. Stephanie, would you like to? Yeah, sure. So this kind of has to do with more like the beginning of my undergrad. So in high school, actually coming into undergrad, I was kind of excited that, we all get accepted here and all the freshmen are kind of the same because we start fresh and we come in not really expecting too much. But when I started meeting people, it was kind of a lonely time just because so many people seemed more prepared than I did. And I went to a high school where APs weren't really a thing. We had honors classes, but APs weren't a thing at all. And so people came in here with like so many transfer credits and I was like, oh, I don't, I think I'm behind. But that didn't really have to, that wasn't really my fault. And even though, you might compare yourself to everyone else and we all come from different backgrounds, but we're all still here. So I think that's really important to consider when you're first getting accepted here, like during your undergrad that, I mean, we're all here and we're all getting an education. And that's really important to consider. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Vera or Ruby? Yeah, sure, I can go. I guess one thing that I've discovered is my capability coming into Cal. Like it's such a big place. And just like Stephanie was saying, like I didn't, we had like one AP class. We didn't have any honors, like coming in with other students who already have like, they're declared already because they had so many transfer credits or there was so many APs out there, like high school offered, like it was a different experience. But as like my time progressed here at Cal and I was in more rigorous courses and I was doing more things than I was in different kinds of spaces, I kind of realized that like, I am capable of being here and I think that's really important for students to understand, especially from like lower income or like marginalized and like people of color to realize that. Thank you. I guess I can. All right. Pess? Okay. So I think for my own experience, something that I didn't expect is that I didn't expect astronomy to involve coding at all. So when I thought about like, oh, I'm going to become an astronomy like astrophysics major, I figured I'll be like looking through a telescope. And I did get to do that. But then I didn't realize that a huge part of astrophysical research is the coding part. So that was something that like threw me off and I was really scared at first because when I started as a freshman in Cal, I did not have any like prior coding experience. I mean, maybe some like really small ones, but nothing like, I did not know Python at all. That's like the coding language that we use. But I was very glad that there are resources that like for example, there's a decal. If you don't know what a decal is essentially like a student run class on like Python. And so I was able to take that my first semester and I didn't expect that I could find coding fun. Like I thought it was something that's really tedious and I didn't think I would be interested in it. But it turns out that if it is motivated by something that I like, which is astronomy and like the pursuit of astronomy, it can be really exciting. And I actually do now enjoy like the process of coding to like solve a question or something like that. And then kind of related but not related is that I used to kind of think that once you're in college, you should quote unquote like only focus on one thing. Like you shouldn't kind of like think about other things, you know, like once you choose your major, like that's all you do. Like you don't really get to think about anything else. But I'm really glad to discover that it's still okay to like have other interests as well. Like Stephanie, you're still in like mariachi and like I'm also doing dance like in my time here as a student. So I think it's really comforting to know that, you know, you don't have to like fully let everything go. Like you can still have like be your own person and like do something that makes you happy like as your time, during your time as a student. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. So could you describe someone, could you describe the most rewarding experience you've had at Berkeley? So I think for me, it was, it might, this might sound really vague but just the experience of like realizing that I could like go through my classes here at Cal. I feel like it was really intimidating as a freshman to think about like, oh, I'm going to UC Berkeley. Like I don't know if I quote unquote have what it takes to like take all the like really hard like math and physics classes. But every single time I like doubt myself, I would go to a midterm or an exam. I would feel kind of like scared but then at the end of the day, I realized that I was able to push through and that was like really rewarding to think about that. Also like thinking about my background, I don't think I've mentioned this but I am not from the United States. Like I'm from Indonesia and I used to live in like a village when I was really young. So I did not have any resources to like telescopes or like observatories or stuff like that until I was a lot older. And to think about that, that little girl is able to grow to be like who I am today and actually have a bachelor's in astrophysics is crazy to think about. So that is, I think all the like things that accumulate to where I am today, that's all like really, really rewarding and I'm really grateful for. Thank you. Stephanie, Ruby. Oh, okay. Yeah, I can share. Yeah, so I think, sorry, what was the question? It was the most rewarding experience you've had at Berkeley. Yeah, so I think Berkeley is such a unique place. I mean, it's much more different than a lot of universities because Berkeley puts you in so many different situations. I mean, just existing and being here and walking through campus makes you more politically conscious and really has taught me to have more empathy for the world and for the people around and people that live in Berkeley. And yeah, I think that's the biggest thing. Sorry, that's my resolution. Thank you. Yeah. Dominic or Ruby, would you? Okay, I guess one thing for me was I had the honor of being able to be an orientation leader for Golden Bear orientation this past semester. And that was a lot of fun. My group was amazing, my partner was amazing and I think kind of trying to give back to the campus community and that like every time I've kind of like moved from like one space to another. So whether that's from middle school to high school or high school to college, there's always kind of this like, I think awkwardness that comes with settling into a new space. And so I think for me, it was meaningful to try to I think give back to the community and help other people's experiences be hopefully a little bit less like awkward than it was for me and settling into the campus because it's a lot to take in. And so I mean, I hope I did my part but I found it was a really great experience not only just to see community develop among the students but me amongst my peers. So the other orientation leaders I worked with with the students I encountered and with the orientation mentors and staff that I had the pleasure of working with. And so for me, that was really meaningful just because communities are hard to come by and I think finding them wherever you are and taking advantage of wherever you can find this community is super important whether that's like a religious organization or a club like a quidditch or like a fun class or just anything like to kind of seize the day so to speak with those communities. Thank you Dominic. I think a rewarding experience for me is being able to help my younger sisters know how to navigate higher education. I didn't really have that. As I said, my grandma was the first person in our family, the only other person to go to university. So I applied in the pandemic like completely all alone and that was something that was really difficult for me because I didn't know like the right documentations. I didn't know like what to put for a lot of things. So like being able to like take my knowledge that I obtained here and bring it back to my community and to my younger sisters and to other people in my community, it's super important. Thank you. So thank you for being here today. Thank you for entrusting us with your loved ones for their college experience. We're very grateful and we're very honored and we also wanted to thank you for your help with us too. I hope this session has been informative. I'm available to talk if you have any questions about the Berkeley experience. In closing, I wanted to thank Susan and her team for putting this event together and also to thank these extraordinary Berkeley students. For spending the time with us today and just being extraordinary. So thank you very much and go Bears.