“So, how is your first year at college, Sanya?” my family friend, Fatima, asked me as she decided to visit me during the summer.
We walked through the main part of campus, as I promised her to show her the famous Sather Gate. Her daughter excitedly walked beside us, thrilled to hear that Sather Gate inspired the gate in the Monsters University movie.
“It was good–” I grinned, planning on talking about my experience in the dorms before Fatima stopped walking abruptly.
Her daughter and I stopped. We looked at each other, both of us with furrowed eyebrows of confusion before turning toward Fatima.
Fatima looked at her feet, reading the words etched into the ground beside them, “This soil and the airspace extending above it shall not be a part of any nation and shall not be subject to any entity's jurisdiction.” Fatima looked up at me, “What is this for?”
I stared at the words below us, hoping an answer would come to me. I had been on the campus for over a month and walked over those words every single day, yet I had never consciously noticed the flat, circular monument, let alone the words carved into it.
Dejected, I admitted, “I have no idea what that is.”
After doing a bit of research and talking to my fellow campus ambassadors, I learned that the monument was installed to recall the Free Speech Movement on our campus, a political movement that urged for campuses to allow their students to freely protest. In my first semester, I spent hours at the Free Speech Movement Cafe, obviously asserting the historical background of our school, and I repeatedly read the blurbs about the Free Speech Movement at the Koret Visitor Center. Yet, I never heard or read anything about the monument. This led me to question if there were other interesting parts of the campus that I was walking by everyday without properly understanding the history or even noticing their presence in the first place.
During my onboarding process as a campus ambassador, I was given a manual about the UC Berkeley campus, which taught me so much about facts I realized I would never know unless someone had told me.
I learned that the bear statue in front of Koret Visitor Center was named Sturdy, and that the smallest bear statue on campus was above the entrance to South Hall. I learned that UC Berkeley had a village in Albany, filled with students who are married or have dependents. I learned that Wurster Hall was renamed Bauer Wurster Hall to celebrate both Caroline Bauer Wurster and William Wurster. My favorite fact that I learned was that the fountain next to the student union was named Ludwig Fountain, after a dog who loved to wade in the water.
There is so much to take in from our campus with over 200 buildings, with more in progress to the vast amount of nature that make our campus. The subtler parts of our campus sometimes get overshadowed by the grand lecture halls and towering trees, but that’s what makes the campus so beautiful—there’s always something more to notice and more to learn about the history of it all.