1st year on campus

Dear Incoming Freshman Me: Calm Down!

April 24, 2024
Melina T.

I’ve always looked forward to college. The summer going into fifth grade, I was dragged along to my older sister’s college tours, and while I didn’t love all the walking, I found myself in love with the concept of college. I was awed by the massive campuses, the idea of living with other students, and above all else, having a Chipotle at school. Growing older, the actual education part of college became enticing as well. I didn’t hate high school, but the rigid 12-hour day and standard core classes grew monotonous, making the freedom of what I studied and how I spent my day that came...

Blogging

April 26, 2024
Maggie D.

Hello. My name is Maggie, and I have been running Bear Talk Blog for the past two years.

I got introduced to blogging in the 4th grade. My ELA teacher, Mrs. Mueller, ran her own blog and taught us the purpose and styles of blogging. In the 5th grade, Mrs. Mueller has us start our own blogs on Kid Blog, making required posts once a week. For the month of March, our entire class had the option of participating in the Slice of Life challenge. This was a daily blogging challenge started by the Two Writing Teachers blog,...

How Trial & Error Helped Me Find My Passion

March 6, 2024
Madison K.

I’m an English major, but how did I get here?

When we are young, there are a plethora of things that we want to be, but as we get older, dreams change as we do. What I wanted to do when I was younger is vastly different from what I want to do now, but to get where I am, I went through what I like to call phases, until I found something I truly wanted to pursue.

You see, when I was in elementary school, I wanted to be a fashion designer. Although that idea died as quickly as it was formed. Not only was I a terrible artist, my ideas were...

The Truth About Being A Transfer Student

April 19, 2024
Madison K.

With my first year at Berkeley and my junior year about to end, here is an overview of the reality of what it was like coming to Berkeley to finish the second half of my undergraduate studies.

Right off the bat, I’m going to tell you that I love being a transfer student.

Going to community college out of high school was definitely what was best for me. For a bit of background, when I was a senior in college, I applied to ten schools: five UC’s and five Cal States. Out of those ten, the few that I got accepted into were schools I didn’t really...

Designing a Four Year Plan: How Triple-Majoring Helped Me Find My Academic Niche

April 5, 2024
Rohit J.

The release of enrollment time is one of the most dreaded moments in any Berkeley student’s semester. Walking out of Moffitt Library, I often overhear the same conversations every year: “Is April 24th Day 1 or Day 2?”, “Why aren’t they offering this class next semester?”, “Yo, what are you taking next fall? After many semesters of bad enrollment slots, I finally got the coveted early enrollment time I’d only heard fables of my freshmen year.

Putting the novelty of it all aside, it’s difficult to find classes that are currently offered, fit within your time/major...

My First Big Game Experience

March 22, 2024
Melina T.

As a freshman, my year has been filled with “firsts”; my first night in the dorms, my first college lecture, my first midterm, and so on. The year isn’t over yet, but so far my favorite first of all was my first Big Game, our big rivalry football game against Stanford, as a Cal student. I have included the addendum of “as a Cal student” because this was technically the third Big Game that I’ve watched. I attended the 2017 game as a scrawny seventh grader (which I deliberately will not include a photo of) to visit my older sister Alexa, who was a Berkeley sophomore at the time. I...

Living On My Own & The Reality Of It

March 20, 2024
Madison K.

Unlike most college students, I didn’t move out at seventeen. No, instead I moved out at nineteen, when I transferred to Berkeley to finish my college career as an upperclassmen.

After realizing that I was going to be moving to Berkeley from Southern California and living on my own, hundreds of miles away from my family, I was excited but also scared.

There are so many positives when it comes to living on your own and the expectations that I had were most definitely met.

The first thing was making my own schedule without...

[Re]Finding My Academic Passions

March 8, 2024
Ethan C.

Coming into Cal, you’re thrown into a university with much to offer. With six undergraduate colleges, there’s definitely a lot to choose from for your academic pursuits. In the College of Letters and Science alone, there are over 80 different majors to explore and 500 courses you can take alone. Constantly, new majors and minors are being unveiled, and students can engage in a wide variety of different academic departments and programs. When I started at Cal in 2021, I came in as a pre-law student interested in a whole bunch of majors. I switched around a lot (and I mean… A LOT)....

Asks from the Past: Answering Random Questions From My Freshman Year

March 4, 2024
Nichelle W.

Incoming college students are often told that the answer to any specific question is just to Google. But what if there’s no Reddit post or YouTube video with your specific query? In my freshman year, I compiled a list of my questions so my future self could respond. And here I am as a sophomore, providing answers to both arbitrary and serious asks from the past.

First up, we have the dorms: I lived on a single-gender floor in Unit 1 my first year.

1. Can we bring a hair dryer? Can we bring a kettle?

Yes, you can bring...

Why I Chose to Boycott Advice During My First Semester

March 1, 2024
MJ S.

If you thought this was a blog providing advice on political boycotting, you would be woefully mistaken. Let me take you on a journey of failure, revelation, and self-actualization – as Maslow would have it.

I started what I thought would be my first of four years at Cal with great anticipation for future achievement, like I was inching up a black diamond knowing that momentum would release me into a good life once I have earned a sizable academic spread. But four semesters later, I have accumulated a snowball that has brought me further down than up and...