Beginning in the Middle: Making up for lost time as a Second Year
For everyone who graduated from high school before me, moving away for college and making new friends was the starting point of a new chapter in their lives and bookends the old chapter at home. I’ve been going to school there for a year now....
Uncelebrated Wins
Have you ever felt like all your hard work isn’t good enough? I’m a first-generation student, and my parents constantly ask me about my future. To them, it’s important that I keep working hard to get a degree. It’s easy to gloss over our success...
Stop Policing our Bodies and Our Marches
It’s impossible to dismantle an oppressive system if you partner with its agents. And yet, the Santa Cruz Women’s March (SCWM) is partnering with the Santa Cruz Police Department (SCPD) for a march that will, apparently, advocate for intersectional women’s rights. The choice to collaborate...
Career Opportunities in the Modern Internet Age
To understand what careers may lie ahead for me in the near future, I sometimes surf Linkedin to see people’s current professions and how they got there. There’s nothing noteworthy to me most of the time, though one career path always catches my eye: Social/New...
Bitter and Frustrated: A Retrospective of Pop Music in 2017
With political and social tensions increasing in the U.S., disturbance from this broken climate consumed American pop music in 2017. Artists responded to a frustratingly chaotic year with more down-tuned, grim and drained music — an appropriate companion to the multitude of global problems. 2017’s...
Please Select One
I was in third grade when I realized I was biracial. “Please Select One,” I was instructed as I stared down at the race identity section of the STAR test, the tip of my pencil hovering back and forth over circles marked “Asian” and “White.”...
Privilege of Information
I arrived home after four months of little wifi to “Betsy DeVos and God’s Plan for Schools,” “2,300 U.S. Foreclosures Show a Racial Divide in House Decay,” “Biden, Sanders, Warren: Too Soon for 2020?” “How Social Isolation Is Killing Us,” “What’s hurting California’s budget: The...
Looking Past the Screen
While I was in Paris, the city experienced flooding so extensive that boats couldn’t fit under bridges. The excess water halted the usual traffic of tourist cruises on the Seine River and museums were closed to save the artwork from water damage. On my way...
Black Lives Are YOUR Future
Now that I am entering my senior year at UC Santa Cruz, I have learned firsthand how to navigate the predominantly white institution through the “veil.” The “veil” is a metaphor coined by Dr. W.E.B. DuBois in his novel “The Souls of Black Folk”, which describes how a Black person...
UCSC Dining Halls are Hazardous and Negligent
Enter any dining hall on campus and you’ll see a framed certificate on the wall declaring UC Santa Cruz the “Most Vegan-Friendly College” in the nation. Venture a few feet further and you’ll see that it’s anything but. As an incoming first-year, I decided to...