1st year on campus

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...

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)....

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...

For most of my life I have known that I wanted to do something related to books later in life. I’ve almost always either wanted to be an author or work in publishing. So when applying to college, it was only natural for me to put English down for what I wanted to major in.

The summer before I came to college, I spent a lot of time talking to people about going to Berkeley and began doubting my choice of major. English made sense to me and what I wanted to do, but a lot of people seemed judgeful of it as my major. I worked in a small coastal...