Sinai was voted in unanimously by the four sitting board members from a pool of 10 candidates. Sinai will fill the seat vacated by former board president Leah Wilson, who stepped down in March after being appointed court executive officer for the Alameda County Superior Court. Wilson resigned citing concerns about a conflict of interest.

Current board president Karen Hemphill said that despite a strong applicant pool, Sinai had qualities that showed the board she was the most suitable person for the job.

“I felt that the Board needed someone who was already familiar with the District and was involved in public education and Julie met all of these attributes,” Hemphill said in an email.  “She has been a long-time public school activist, used to work for the District and in her current work at the university, it’s all about partnerships and collaboration.”

Before working at UC Berkeley, Sinai was also chief of staff to Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates. Sinai said she hopes to apply her previous community and university experience to the school district and help the board with its current challenges, which include a new superintendent, increased efforts to improve academic achievement and heated negotiations with teachers’ unions.

“My future plans are to become familiar with the issues that the board has to tackle and look how to move our equity work forward,” Sinai said. “I will also help with looking at the physical status of a student district and do whatever I can do to reach an agreement with the unions.”

Michelle Moskowitz, director of advocacy and institutional relations at UC Berkeley, works with Sinai and congratulated her appointment, saying she believes Sinai will exceed expectations on the board.

“I think Julie will be an amazing asset to the board, as she has many years of experience working for the city of Berkeley,” Moskowitz said. “They could not have made a better choice. All of her colleagues at the Government and Community Relations Office congratulate her.”

Hemphill said she is glad to be working with Sinai and believes that the board will benefit from working with her.

“I expect that Julie will be a great asset in building partnerships with our community, the County and of course the University,” Hemphill said in an email.  “She also will be great in furthering our work to advance overall academic achievement and Julie’s up close knowledge of what a governing body does and how an effective elected body works together through her work as the Mayor’s Chief of Staff will be very useful.”

Sinai will serve the remainder of Wilson’s term until the seat comes up for re-election in November 2014.

Contact Seif Abdelghaffar at sabdelghaffar@dailycal.org.

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About 80 students and faculty members attended the forum at Anna Head Alumnae Hall. Students asked questions that spanned student athletics, Dirks’ time as dean of the faculty of arts and sciences at Columbia University and his relationship with the UC Board of Regents.

At the event, Dirks said he supported UC Berkeley’s public mission and that he hopes to have a positive influence on the university.

“I believe that UC Berkeley is not just the greatest public university, but it is the best university because it is public,” Dirks said. “I want this university to be a place that educates both undergraduate and graduate students and makes them future leaders.”

Dirks also said he hopes to work closely with student groups and the ASUC, noting that at Columbia — where he previously worked — there was no student group like the ASUC that directly represents the interests of students.

“Berkeley has a long tradition of making students’ voices heard, and I am willing to listen to those issues and address them,” Dirks said.  “I want to set up regular evening sessions in the University House with multiple student groups and have open discussions to bring attention to not only problems in the student community but to solutions as well. Together, we can resolve any issue.”

ASUC President Connor Landgraf said it was valuable that students met Dirks at the forum so they could see he was willing to take on the challenges facing UC Berkeley.

“I think it’s really important for him to meet with students,” Landgraf said. “This shows that he wants engage with students and know them personally.”

On Wednesday, Dirks met with the ASUC Senate at its weekly meeting. Dirks aimed to address senators’ concerns and answer their questions, Landgraf said.

“The meeting last night went very well,” Landgraf said. “He is very respectful to students and their concerns, and he spent a lot of time answering questions. I think he will be a fantastic chancellor because he understands the students’ needs and concerns. I’m excited to see what he does.”

After the forum, campus freshman Riley Murray said he believes that Dirks’ background makes him well-suited to address the problems facing the university. Murray was impressed by Dirks at the meeting and thinks the chancellor-designate will have a calming influence on the university.

“He’s not what I expected,” Murray said. “He made it very clear that he hasn’t yet gone into the intricacies of all of (UC) Berkeley’s issues, but he displayed a curiosity and a willingness to solve these problems rather than just being obliged to solve them.”

Contact Seif Abdelghaffar at sabdelghaffar@dailycal.org.

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Six groups presented the council with seven different plans for redistricting, one of which was made by the Berkeley Student District Campaign in an attempt to create a student supermajority district. UC Berkeley junior and current redistricting director Noah Efron, senior Michael Manset and junior and ASUC External Affairs Vice President-elect Safeena Mecklai all presented for the BSDC.

Representatives of the BSDC said in the meeting that because the student community is currently divided into four districts, it is difficult for students to have their voices heard on the council. A student supermajority district would allow students to be represented on City Council.

“Twenty-five percent of Berkeley residents are students and they are not represented,”  Manset said during his presentation. “By creating a student district, students will have an institutionalized seat on the council to represent them. Our plan has District 7 remain the student district but increase in size so that 86 percent of students live in the district.”

Mecklai said that if having a student council member is not possible, the council member elected should understand student issues and be in tune with issues in student life.

“If the student community is condensed to one district, students will have more of a voice on the council,” Efron said. “The student community should be seen as a community of interest because while crime has decreased in other districts, in the student community crime has remained the same.

UC Berkeley alumnus Alfred Twu also submitted a redistricting plan and said that a student district should be made so that students could have a voice on the council.  However, Sherry Smith, president of the League of Women Voters of Berkeley, Albany and Emeryville, said that other communities and neighborhoods should also be considered when redistricting rather than just the student community.

“I can see why students would want a student district because then they would have an impact on the council and the council member elected by them would be responsive to their needs,” Smith said. “However, there are other communities of interest, such as the West Berkeley neighborhood, that should be considered. So what the council must do is weigh all the submitted plans out and possibly merge some together to achieve what is best for the city of Berkeley.”

Berkeley City Council will meet again on May 7 to vote on a redistricting plan and will begin to modify and change the plan once it is chosen.

Contact Seif Abdelghaffar at sabdelghaffar@dailycal.org.

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Professors Frances Hellman, Alison Gopnik, Jitendra Malik, Susan Marqusee, David Miller, Hitoshi Murayama, Pamela Samuelson, Ann Swidler, T. Don Tilley and Bin Yu were all recognized in a wide variety of fields and will now have a lifetime membership in the academy, joining the likes of Nelson Mandela, Denzel Washington and Michael Dell.

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences is an independent policy research center, and members come from a broad range of professions and disciplines. Those inducted into the academy are viewed as leaders in academics, public affairs, the arts and business. Once inducted, members contribute to the academy by participating in research and publishing studies in fields such as science and technology, energy and global security and social policy.

Yu, a chancellor’s professor and professor of statistics, electrical engineering and computer sciences, expressed delight at being inducted.

“It is a great honor, and I am humbled,” Yu said. “The Academy of Arts and Sciences is so prestigious because of the very high quality of people and their work in the American Academy. Being inducted is an affirmation of my work in statistics, and it is also a recognition of my collaborators, including students and postdocs, through the recognition of our joint work.”

UC Berkeley now has 234 members in the academy, which, according to professor and chair of physics and inductee Hellman, highlights the strengths of UC Berkeley as both a research institution and as a university.

“Berkeley is an institution that prides itself on its creation and dissemination of knowledge and its service to the broad community through the research, teaching and service activities undertaken by its faculty, students and staff,” Hellman said. “Berkeley, to me, represents the pinnacle of an example of what great things can happen when the public and private sectors work together.”

This year’s number of inductees from UC Berkeley has increased from last year, and Associate Vice Chancellor for Research Robert Price believes that this shows UC Berkeley’s strength in all subjects.

“This is testament to our strength across the board,” Price said. “The new academy members from UC Berkeley represent a wide range of disciplines, from physics to law, psychology to computer sciences, English to statistics, biosciences to sociology. I am very pleased to see the achievements of UC Berkeley faculty recognized in all of these fields.”

The new inductees will be honored in a ceremony at the academy’s headquarters in Cambridge, Mass., in October.

Contact Seif Abdelghaffar at sabdelghaffar@dailycal.org.

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Nacouzi is one of at least 11 UC Berkeley students and Berkeley residents confirmed to be uninjured in the aftermath of the deadly bombing of the Boston Marathon on Monday.

The historic Boston Marathon came to an abrupt halt after two bombs exploded near the finish line on Boylston Street. The explosions killed three people and injured more than 170, with approximately 60 people in serious or critical condition, CNN reported.

“We’re relieved that so far, it appears that members of the UC Berkeley community that were in Boston are safe and sound,” said UC Berkeley spokesperson Dan Mogulof. “At the same time, we all mourn the loss of the innocent lives that were lost in this horrible attack, and we hope that the perpetrators will soon be brought to justice.”

Nacouzi, a UC Berkeley junior, finished her first marathon alongside her sister. After passing the finish line, Nacouzi heard the first bomb go off and heard the second explosion a few seconds later.

“When we heard the second explosion and saw all the smoke, we realized what was happening and started rushing the opposite direction,” Nacouzi said. “The scariest part was thinking another bomb might go off somewhere closer to us and not knowing what was going to happen next or if your family was hurt.”

Nolan McPeek-Bechtold, another UC Berkeley junior, crossed the finish line and left the event before the first explosion occurred. He said that a police officer at the Boston Metro informed him of the incident.

“I was mostly just in disbelief that it happened,” McPeek-Bechtold said. “Everything about the race, especially the thousands of volunteers and hundreds of thousands of spectators, was so positive that it was hard to imagine that something so awful could happen.”

McPeek-Bechtold said he plans to run in the Boston Marathon next year because he believes that runners should not be deterred by the tragedy.

“I think it is important that everyone is careful and vigilant to ensure the future safety of the race, but also that we still come together and celebrate the race and honor those who suffered in this year’s tragedy,” McPeek-Bechtold said. “The race is not just about individual runners, but about the 27,000 runners and 500,000 spectators who come together and make the 26.2 miles of road from Hopkinton to Boston come to life for one day a year.”

The Daily Californian is still looking for UC Berkeley students, faculty and alumni as well as Berkeley residents who participated in the Boston Marathon. If you have any further information, please email newsdesk@dailycal.org.

Contact Seif Abdelghaffar at sabdelghaffar@dailycal.org.

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HackJam2, which took place Saturday, allowed students to work on different projects and share them with other hackers. Hackers@Berkeley, a student-run organization dedicated to hacking, hosted the event for the second time this semester in the recently opened Texas Instruments Electronics & Design Lab in Cory Hall.

“We host these events to create a low-pressure environment where beginners can start out,” said Sumukh Sridhara, a member of Hackers@Berkeley. “Our goal for this event was to get people to work in the hackerspace and hold workshops to teach people about topics like hardware. We also wanted to foster the spirit of innovation at Berkeley.”

To win the hackathon, students had to work on a project and demo it in 12 hours, all the while enjoying the relaxed environment of the new lab in Cory Hall. The prizes for the event were an assortment of board games, plush toys and card decks. After the winner was announced, the remaining prizes were awarded through a game of musical chairs.

“We wanted everyone to feel comfortable regardless of experience with hackathons –— our hackjams aren’t intended to be competitive,” Sridhara said.  “Having it at the new hackerspace in Cory was great because we had access to a hardware lab right next door.”

The eventual winner of HackJam2, freshman Dylan Chun Wong, said he regularly attends hackathons because he sees them as a learning experience as well as fun events.

“This was my first solo hack — it encourages me to persevere, because each event lets me rack up more experience,” Wong said.  “I’m a regular participant at hackathons held by school organizations, and this one was no different. I find events like this are the best place to learn something new.”

Wong’s project, Pixel People, involved a roleplaying-style game that allowed players to walk around and talk to “spirits.” In the game, the spirits’ speech is actually Facebook posts pulled from the player’s Facebook feed and can be “liked” from within the game.

Among the other notable projects were Circles!, an application that creates screensavers for graphic calculators, and Bartwith.me, an application that allows people to find friends riding the BART train at the same time as them.

As the lab is open to all students, many chose to work on other projects without taking part in the competition.

“This hackathon wasn’t only for competitors but also for those who just wanted to work on their own projects,” said freshman Abhinava Singh. “It’s a very relaxing environment that makes it easier to get work done.”

Contact Seif Abdelghaffar at sabdelghaffar@dailycal.org.

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Texas Instruments partnered with UC Berkeley to open the Texas Instruments Electronics Design Lab on the first and second floors of Cory Hall.  The “hackerspace” is open to all students but is dedicated to electrical engineering and computer sciences majors.

“We were discussing this project for about a year and a half with Texas Instruments, and the TI Electronics Design Lab will allow students to go beyond what they learn in class and design and create their own projects,” said former chair of the campus EECS department Costas Spanos, who spearheaded the project.

Current EECS chair David Culler noted that the lab was designed by students. He added that the main goal of this lab is to accommodate all students and aid them in expanding their ideas and projects.

“This lab provides students with more space,” Culler said. “Due to the rapid pace of innovation, we needed more room for the students and their projects.”

While the lab’s construction was funded by Texas Instruments, its equipment and tools were provided by Agilent, an electronics and communications company.

“The cooperation with Texas Instruments and Agilent on this project is brilliant because we are a public institution that creates vibrant industry, and industry gives back to us,” Culler said. “It’s a virtuous cycle.”

ASUC President Connor Landgraf, a bioengineering major, reiterated these sentiments and said he hopes that the lab will help students gain work experience.

“This lab is really exciting because it’s a needed space for students,” Landgraf said. “They can come here and collaborate with others and do things they can’t do in other labs and have an out-of-class experience.”

Brian Crutcher, the senior vice president of Texas Instruments, spoke at the ribbon-cutting ceremony and emphasized that the lab would benefit present and future engineers.

“Through this building, we wish to invest in the future and make an impact on the world,” Crutcher said. “It’s about a place where engineers of the future can come together and collaborate and innovate with one another. It’s a place where things they do in class can be put into practice so they can be prepared for work when the graduate. It is a place where their imaginations can grow.”

Aditya Yellapragada, a member of Pioneers in Engineering, said that this lab is a necessary addition to the campus because it is open to all students and not just graduate students.

“One of the reasons that this lab is useful is that we, as a group, try to convince high school students to come to college by hosting robotics competitions,” Yellapragada said. “This lab allows us to use tools and pieces of equipment to improve our robots, and with these tools, we can create things that we normally can’t create in other labs.”

Contact Seif Abdelghaffar at sabdelghaffar@dailycal.org.

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Berkeley Microfinance, founded by senior Jasmine Segall last semester, is an ASUC-sponsored student group that seeks to aid small businesses on campus and in the Bay Area by giving them access to interest-free microfinance loans as well as allowing students to act as loan officers and gain fieldwork experience.

“The main goal is to empower local, low-income entrepreneurs in the Bay Area,” said Christine Foo, a member of Berkeley Microfinance, in an email.

According to Segall, the purpose of microfinance is to provide collateral-free and interest-free financial services to small business owners who would be unable to take out traditional bank loans with higher interest rates.

Berkeley Microfinance facilitates the lending process as a trustee of Kiva Zip, a nonprofit organization that enables people to make direct loans between $25 and $5,000 online to entrepreneurs in the United States and Kenya. The student group is responsible for identifying potential borrowers, evaluating the borrowers’ ability to repay the loan and endorsing the borrowers on Kiva Zip.

Segall said that a benefit of microfinance is that the loans do not depend on the client’s credit score but rather on trust between the client and the lending institution established through the endorsement process.

Members of Berkeley Microfinance came across Asabi’s soap bar stand in the Berkeley Flea Market, where she spoke to them about her need for more capital to buy soap-making equipment. After Berkeley Microfinance guided Asabi through the process and endorsed her on Kiva Zip, she became the group’s first borrower to obtain a $5,000 loan.

“I am really encouraged by the willingness of so many strangers to lend me money and believe in my vision,” Asabi said. “It is a benefit to many entrepreneurs that don’t have access to the capital needed to further their businesses.”

Asabi will use this money to expand her business, and once she pays back the loan lenders can choose to withdraw their money or loan it to another entrepreneur.

Berkeley Microfinance is currently working on establishing more partnerships with local businesses as well as educating UC Berkeley students on the importance of microfinance. The group aims to endorse four more borrowers by May and will hold a career panel discussing microfinance on April 12.

“Our long term goal is to become an established, well-reputed Trustee on Kiva Zip that endorses high quality borrowers and maintain a forum for students who wish to discuss, learn, and gain hands-on experience in the field of microfinance,” Foo said.

Contact Seif Abdelghaffar at sabdelghaffar@dailycal.org.

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The conference, named Beyond Academia, allows doctoral and postdoctoral students to receive tips from company recruiters and hear from speakers who earned doctorates and have since transitioned into the private sector.

“We created the Beyond Academia conference based on our own interest in jobs outside of the traditional tenure-track professorship,” said Bryan Alvarez, one of the organizers of Beyond Academia and a seventh-year doctoral student in psychology. “The goal is just to let people look around in places they don’t normally have access to as easily and learn more about themselves in the process.”

The conference is taking place at a time when graduate students, who have traditionally gone into academic careers, find it more difficult to become faculty members and thus need to explore more career options.

A survey conducted by the National Science Foundation found that the percentage of graduate students in all fields who find academic jobs upon graduation fell from 23.2 percent in 1991 to 19.4 percent in 2011.

“In part, there are not enough available jobs for every graduate student to have a professorial job,” Alvarez said. “It seems unlikely that the hundreds of thousands of graduate students in the U.S. alone, qualified with the wealth and breadth of training they have received, would all want the exact same job. It’s OK for graduate students to reach beyond the career path they are assumed to want.”

According to a survey conducted by UC Berkeley’s Career Center, between 2007 and 2009, 57 percent of students who graduated with doctorates received jobs in academia, with 35 percent of those in tenure-track positions. Additionally, the percentage of UC Berkeley doctoral students who obtain faculty positions is higher than the national average of 41 percent.

Marty Nemko, a UC Berkeley doctorate recipient and keynote speaker for Beyond Academia, said that even for UC Berkeley doctoral students, the job market is far from easy due to cost-cutting measures that limit academic employment in some universities.

“Universities are under great pressure to convince prospective students that four to eight years and $100,000-plus is time and money well spent,” Nemko said. “To control costs, universities hire more part-time faculty and hire fewer professors by having current professors teach in large lectures or online.”

Alvarez said that this conference was requested by his colleagues, and he hopes that through this event, participants will understand that they are capable and qualified to obtain jobs that are not academic-related.
Beyond Academia will take place on March 22 from 9 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. in International House.

Contact Seif Abdelghaffar at sabdelghaffar@dailycal.org.

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Sponsored by CalSERVE Senator Daley Vertiz and approved by the senate March 7, the ASUC Textbook Scholarship Program will provide awardees with $100 to $250 to pay for textbooks from the Cal Student Store.

“We started (the scholarship) first and foremost to address the issue of textbook affordability and to finance that high cost of higher education,” Vertiz said. “Textbook rates have increased lately, and as a fellow student, I don’t think it’s fair.”

According to the bill, SB 51, college textbook prices have increased by 812 percent since the late 1970s. The bill also noted that the average cost of textbooks for a UC Berkeley student is currently $1,214 and that 70 percent of undergraduates in the U.S. said that they could not purchase one or more textbooks due to costs.

“Students should have the right resources at this amazing university and should be able to buy the textbooks they need,” said Monica Ruiz, who helped co-author the bill.

Vertiz said that the creation of the scholarship was inspired by the Education Opportunity Program, which serves low-income, first-generation and underrepresented students. The EOP runs a similar textbook scholarship that was founded by Valerie Jameson, another co-author of the bill.

“My program with EOP was a pilot program, and when I met Daley and worked on it more concretely, we started to envision a scholarship like this for the entire student community,” Jameson said.

The ASUC has allocated $2,000 from its yearly budget to help fund the scholarship. However, Ruiz said she hopes that other student groups will contribute as well. The senate also hopes to find private funding to sustain the scholarship and make it available to more students.

“We are planning to fundraise across various campus departments whose mission align closely with that of the scholarship to make this campus more equitable and affordable for all students,” Vertiz said. “Next year, we also plan to explore the idea of launching a donation drive that will allow ASUC alumni to donate to the scholarship fund.”

Many UC Berkeley students agreed that there was a need for such a scholarship.

“I’ve been very annoyed with buying my textbooks, and it’s been very stressful because at the start of the semester none of your classes are set in stone, and it’s a huge financial commitment,” said UC Berkeley freshman Mohammed Jomaa. “This scholarship would be hugely beneficial for me, personally, so I wouldn’t have to make that financial commitment.”

Under the program, 40 percent of the scholarships will be allocated to students with an expected family contribution of between $0 and $5,291; 30 percent will be given to those with a family contribution of between $5,291 and $29,000 and 15 percent for those with a family contribution above $29,000. The final 15 percent would be allocated to students with AB 540 status, which describes certain nonresident students who have attended high school in California and received a high school diploma in the state.

The application for the ASUC Textbook Scholarship is available to all enrolled students and will be released on the ASUC website in April.

Contact Seif Abdelghaffar at sabdelghaffar@dailycal.org.

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