Many majors are put into classification schemes that limit the options of academic interest. There is often a dichotomy between the average humanities major and the average science major. Yes, clear distinctions tend to help with categorization, but defining majors by either being in the humanities or sciences is fallacious.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “humanity,” in reference to the academic field, to be “the branch of learning concerned with human culture.” But shouldn’t this definition apply to all majors, then? In chemistry and physics, aren’t we simply studying the effects of humanity and how to better our species and interact with other species? I think that the distinction between humanities and sciences is a bit misleading because it assumes the field of science does not deal with humanity, when in reality science and certain fields of study are all about humanity.

The deciding factor in the debate of whether or not to major in humanities is money. People are generally steered away from majoring in the nonsciences with the justification being that humanities majors do not make as much money as science majors do. But is money really the true matter at hand? I think that worrying about a future salary while still in college is stressful, not to mention extremely petty. Money talk simply fuels the capitalist society in which we live. Before prematurely taking money into account, I find it valuable to reexamine why one pursues an academic career.

Do we go to school to get a better salary or to gain insight as to how we fit into society? Although the former is true, the latter exemplifies the bottom line: Society has normalized higher education. In high school, it feels like the next logical step to reaching adulthood is to enroll in a college of some sort. If we are expected to attain higher education, then we should have the freedom and support to explore different academic fields and focus on whichever pertains to us most. And I also think that it is healthy to leave the postcollege worrying until postcollege, regardless of finances and jobs.

In comparison to a science major, the average humanities major is faced with high unemployment rates and lower average wages. Although this is definitely something to take into account, having motivation will play a stronger role in changing such statistics. Our generation is typically pressured to go into supposedly successful fields such as medicine, law and scientific research — perhaps this will change in five to 10 years, because there might be an abundance of doctors and lawyers vying for the same jobs. Be motivated, and have a passion for what you study and enjoy doing, for young passion and eagerness will help you in the future.

So do all humanities majors go on to become professors in their fields? Definitely not. But many undergraduates in the nonsciences tend to enjoy their field so much that they seek a doctorate in the subject. People have admitted to me their fear of an overpopulation of people with doctorates in the humanities and not enough demand for them. While graduate school is a viable option for students in the humanities, don’t feel limited to a postsecondary education. But if you do find yourself seeking to continue onto a graduate program, the investment can be justified if you have an immense passion for the subject. If you want to go to graduate school for the humanities, do so if the fiery passion is there.

Am I worried about my future? Yes, but who isn’t? Before worrying about post-college, worry about college. I am trying to make the most of my time here at UC Berkeley and enjoy the humanities path. By exploring my academic interests in interdisciplinary fields, I have had the opportunity to further my knowledge of how society functions, and that is something I find invaluable to all “humanities” majors.

We, as college students, have the privilege to explore and choose our futures. Don’t feel obligated to classify yourself in the humanities or sciences binary. Challenge normative and capitalist ideals of the future — your future.

Contact Matthew Kirschenbaum at mkirschenbaum@dailycal.org or follow him on Twitter: @mpkirschenbaum.

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Coming to California was the same way. I lived in the same house in the same small Pennsylvania town my entire life before coming across the country to Berkeley. I had never even been to California before orientation, but I didn’t have any reservations about picking up and starting over after 18 years of the same.

When relatives and family friends back home ask me where I want to go after college (“Do you want to come back east, or are you going to stay in California forever?”), I tell them I’m not setting my sights on any one place in particular, since I’ll ultimately have to go wherever I can find a job. “Better not to get attached,” I tell them. That seems like the mature, reasonable thing to say, but it’s really just a coping mechanism. After all, I’m an English major whose goal is to go into print journalism — and newspapers clearly aren’t as plentiful as they used to be. Neither are jobs for English majors, although maybe they never were in the first place.

But there’s more to it than not wanting to get my hopes up on a vision of myself in a specific place and job in a few years’ time. The truth is, I’ve put a lot of effort into not getting attached to places in general. I never felt a very strong connection to the place where I grew up, and I always had the expectation that I would leave when I had the chance, as my brother and sister did before me. That I would miss my friends and family to a reasonable extent when the time came was expected, but it was nothing I didn’t feel capable of dealing with.

I was prepared for it to be hard to leave my family and friends and the seasons and greenness of the East Coast. I didn’t expect it to be as easy as it was. Beyond a few obligatory tears shed while hugging my parents goodbye, the foreignness of Berkeley dissipated almost immediately after I stepped off the plane with Joni Mitchell ringing in my ears.

And that’s normal these days, I suppose. People live such transcontinental lives that a few months spent away from home is nothing to lose sleep over. But for me, this transition was a milestone in my life, not just because it was the traditional “moving away from home and learning to be independent” experience every young person must go through. I took my own adaptability as proof that I was well-adjusted enough to not get hung up on something as trite as homesickness. To me, getting hung up on missing people or places was a sign of weakness. People who went home every weekend were just less mature than I was. Of course, Thanksgiving was a little hard, but Skype makes these things much easier nowadays, doesn’t it?

Maybe it helped that many of my closest friends from home moved away as well, and our breaks often didn’t really match up. I saw some of them for the first time in over a year over this past break and was surprised to see how little things had changed.

The first winter break seemed like an unending series of “So, how do you like it?” and “Is it hard being so far away?” but I enjoyed being able to tell people I loved the place I’d chosen and had no regrets whatsoever.

But now I wonder: Was it really emotional maturity and detachment from the idea of home that made the transition so easy? My outlook on homesickness began to change last year. I was only back on the East Coast for about a month collectively in 2012, and the vague sense of nostalgia that grew in me over the months spent away gradually made me realize that maybe my self-professed detachment from home was actually just a defense mechanism after all.

This semester, several of my closest friends are studying abroad, most of them living outside of California for the first time. Seeing them go through the same unfamiliarity brings me back to those first nights in my dorm room, the first Thanksgiving without my family. I was lying to myself when I thought I didn’t miss home.

It’s OK to admit that I miss fireflies, watching movies with my parents, arguing with my siblings and fried Pennsylvania Dutch food. Homesickness isn’t a weakness — it’s just proof that there’s a connection between who you are and where you come from, even if you never felt that bond while you were there.

Contact Adelyn Baxter at abaxter@dailycal.org.

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I did not fully realize the extent of my appreciation for the human form until last spring, when I attended figure-drawing sessions held at Kroeber Hall that I had found out about through a friend who had similar passions. Open to the public for $2 to $4, these group sessions gathered every Friday at 6:30 p.m. for the simple act of appreciating the human figure and translating that appreciation through any artistic medium of choice. I would sit myself down amid an orchestra of artists ranging from performers within the practice of art major to composers motivated by sheer recreation like myself to aged and knowledgeable Berkeley artisans.

We would all wait patiently with modest eyes for the model to conduct his or her own unveiling, and then the gradual five- to 20-minute increments would orchestrate themselves in silence. With my instrument of choice — either a piece of charcoal or a set of complementary prismacolors — I would compose gestural studies and candid illustrations in my large, red sketchbook of the all-exposed, natural human body.

With every detailed curve and delicate arch of the body, my charcoal would speak intricacies my mind could not easily translate into words or speech. It was as though I were directly reading the narratives of these models with my eyes and transposing their stories into pages upon pages of gestural literature. And they, in turn, were indirectly contributing to a chapter in my story, affirming that this recreational tendency of mine was not one to be ashamed of, censored or suppressed.

The bodies towering center-stage in that classroom, as well as the surrounding eyes perceiving them, all had a story to tell. They all shared a history of dissimilar experiences that led them to stand confidently erect or sit self-assuredly free, just as I was led to that very time and place and circumstance, unapologetic in what came naturally to me.

Figure drawing became a pleasure of mine that I felt no guilt toward — and I indulged in it, fully and intentionally. It became an outlet in which I could observe and explore innate, physical complexities inherent to the human body that I was initially forbidden as an adolescent to acknowledge. It became the source of my own self-actualization, awakening me to the idea that we as humans were naturally designed to be and act as freely as we make possible.

I had not always been this way. I was born into a strictly conservative and traditionally Catholic family. I was raised with an infinite set of values to keep, an exact definition of morality to live by, as well as marred conceptions of virtues to practice and vices to pay heed to. I am the middle of three daughters and a youngest son of Filipino immigrants who imparted to us a cultural collection of stringent gender expectations, familial responsibilities and obligations, and heavily yet humbly outlined notions of respect. And yet, while this upbringing sketched safe, secure and sedentary lives that our parents had planned for us, our American-bred environment gave us the means of exploring otherwise.

Instead of concealing what one naturally feels inclined to do, like allowing the naked self to be read by and exposed to others — or even allowing oneself to realize that there is nothing inherently sinful with the former — I learned to embrace it.

My figural framework became an exhibition of my own self, showcasing the nakedness of beings similar in shape and size and design like you and me. We physically embody a collection of tangential displays of past experiences and future ambitions, all in a curated gallery of the self. The human condition, in both its physical form and mental capacity, is thus a multifaceted work of art that calls for celebration.

What makes this exposing of oneself ring so powerful and true in figure drawing is the actual openness and willingness in vulnerability of the actor before an audience. Self-expression becomes more than just self-fulfillment. It inspires. Like the model positioning his or her self in the center of the room to be seen and observed by surrounding artists, here I present my introverted self in my writing to be read and understood by beings such as your self so that you, too, will be inspired.

Contact Aleli Balaguer at abalaguer@dailycal.org.

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To not pass a class is a gray area of Berkeley academics. Technically, it still appears on my transcript as an unforgiving “NP.” But the other technicality is that it can’t be counted against me. It’s a nonaccomplishment that doesn’t affect my GPA at all. If anything, it’s a pure waste of time and tuition.

I’m a voracious reader, and I love learning for the sake of learning, but rather than read the books listed on syllabi, I’d undertake “Anna Karenina” or “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” I’d swelter under the sun on Memorial Glade, reading the classics, rather than attend my courses.

Hence, my three no-passed classes.

One was a freshman-year mistake. In my first semester, I enrolled in an English course I quickly found too dry, but rather than drop it and find a more stimulating use of my time, I switched my grading option to pass/no pass and just stopped showing up. On the evening of the final, I swiped a few friends into Crossroads instead.

But the other two “no pass” grades weigh more heavily on my conscience. Both were ill-fated attempts on my end to fulfill the science breadth requirements of the College of Letters and Science. (Surprise: I’m an English major.)

I could tell you I’ve struggled mightily with this challenge, but that would be a lie. The truth is that I haven’t given a shit. It’s not even like I’ve enrolled in the more challenging stuff to fulfill the two science breadths (physical and biological, for you science minds who are laughing at me right now). Hell, I’ve avoided classes that require labs as if they were the plague.

Instead, I’ve taken athlete courses. One was titled “Introduction to Oceans,” and the other was literally “Earthquakes in your Backyard.” These classes were passable. But more than that, they were also interesting. Really. I could have easily shown up, worn my glasses to see the board and taken copious notes.

Yet I half-assed. For each course, I bought the textbooks. I convinced my mother that this time would be different and that I’d really try to pass. I showed up for a few weeks, then …

I couldn’t bring myself to do the menial assignments. I simply showed up to the midterms and the finals and accepted that NP at the end of the semester. I knew what I did, after all.

So now I’m in my third quasi-science class. This one’s a natural history course in the geography department. We get to take pictures of cool plants and animals. I don’t know if there’s even a final.

And you know what? I like going to this class. I like listening to my enthusiastic, younger professor for an hour and a half. Sometimes I even take notes, but I’m still not sure what, exactly, to take notes on in science classes that may not have a final.

I guess there’s something deeper at work here, and I’m calling it a change of heart.

I’ve squandered the amazing opportunity that was presented to me at age 18. I had the chance to attend the premier public university in the world. I also had the chance to be an English major at one of the best English departments in the country.

And I don’t have anything except a 2.7 GPA and three no-passes to show for that.

At the dawn of each new year, I make a resolution to try harder in school. For the last two years, that hope has collected cobwebs. So this time, I went one step further: I don’t want to just try in school. I want to really take something away from each of my classes. This phrase probably now means nothing coming from me, but this year is going to be different. (I promise, Mom).

UC Berkeley was always a dream for me at the back of my mind. College is the last time in my entire life that I’ll be able to sit on my ass and read all day long and not have to pay for things. And I’ve wasted five semesters of that so far.

This is about more than finally knocking down those science breadths. This is about finally making something of my experience here.

To be fair, I have learned a few things. I learned that drinking, at least the way college students do it, isn’t something for which I’ll ever again have the mindset or emotions. I was sports editor of The Daily Californian last fall, the most turbulent time for Cal football. I’ve fallen in love and learned a lot there, too — like the fact that if I want people to stick around, I have to first trust that they will.

But too bad you can’t get graded on that stuff, am I right?

Editor’s Note: Sex on Tuesday will return Feb. 12.

Contact Annie Gerlach at agerlach@dailycal.org.

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The statement is made in a tone of awe by a deep-voiced male narrator while a series of images cut in after each other in rapid succession: hugely magnified blood cells rushing through veins, an extreme close-up on the perfect organization of a leaf, a satellite image of the Earth with lights connected across its surface in lines, a neon map on an iPhone screen, the lit-up power grid of a city at night, a neural network.

The miraculous, we are meant to understand, lies in the way that all of these images are connected, the way that the most basic elements of humans closely resemble those of plants, the way that same grid shows up in city planning and across the entire globe — “in our homes, in our minds.” Connectedness, the commercial tells us, is miraculous. The advertisement is meant to pitch Sprint’s unlimited data package for the iPhone 5.

“We can share every second in data dressed as pixels,” the commercial’s narrator goes on. “A billion roaming photojournalists, uploading the human experience.”

Having an iPhone 5 on Sprint’s unlimited plan, we are to understand, means that we are also unlimited. Selling that message makes a lot of sense for a cellphone company. It means that if we get Sprint, our particular “human experience” is no longer bounded by the limits of being a single human being. With unlimited data, we can “share every second”; we never have to be alone. We become, very clearly, part of the “miraculous” network.

This rhetoric is fairly blatant, and that blatancy makes it easy to see through. We are aware that our relationships have much more to do with how connected we feel than our phone plan. But there’s something else going on in the commercial that I don’t think we’re as good at seeing through.

When the announcer tells us that we can “share every second in data dressed as pixels,” his words accompany the image of a boy running toward his mother. The child’s movement is frozen at various points in the shot between his beginning and end point, as though “every second” has been made individual, as it is in photographs. Once the child arrives in his mother’s open embrace, we zoom into a close-up on the mother’s face, which immediately takes on a pixelated appearance, literalizing “data dressed as pixels.”

The image, which ends with a jarringly close look at the mother’s now-inhuman eye, really disturbs me. And even more than the image, what disturbs me is how much we all seem to believe in what it’s saying — something much subtler than the easy-to-dismiss idea of being unlimited.

When the boy’s movement is broken into photographic freezes and the mother’s face is pixelated, it’s a perfect representation of what happens when moments are compartmentalized into the kind of material that lends itself to being uploaded. It is the visual equivalent of pithy status updates, freeze-frame party photos and perfectly-engineered Tumblr posts.

The idea of “upload(ing) the human experience” is frightening to me. The “human experience” transitions from being something we live to something we observe. We are no longer actors in the human saga — we are “a billion roaming photojournalists” reporting on it with feigned objectivity.

If we are photojournalists, then we are storytellers, practitioners of a craft which relies on the creation of narratives. We fill our Facebooks with carefully curated narratives in which we are simultaneously fantastically interesting and completely uninterested in whether anyone realizes it.

Like the frozen boy, these narratives are reassuring because they are, in appearance at least, permanent. There is a perfection in that permanence. The lovely glow on an Instagram photo I post to Facebook won’t fade like the lovely glow in my head might if future experiences influence the way I look at past ones.

My Facebook is no longer a “wall,” no longer a place for my friends to pin posts that are conscious of being constructed objects. It is a “timeline” that dates all the way back to my birth, chronicling my “human experience” with a clean minimalism.

“I need to upload all of me,” the commercial’s narrator concludes. “I need, no, I have the right to be unlimited.”

Around this time last semester, I wrote a column about why writing was so important to me. “I write because I am a narcissist and want to believe that the most profound experiences of my life will not disappear entirely when I do,” I wrote then.

I don’t like that idea anymore. I don’t like the idea that we must constantly chronicle our experiences for them to have been significant. I don’t want to feel like “I need to upload all of me” to be certain I exist. I know that I exist, and a couple of other people do too. And that feels more connected than any kind of unlimited.

Contact Sarah Burns at sburns@dailycal.org.

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Ten-year-old me, eyes full of tears, rushed home to my mom and told her distraughtly, “I don’t know which vegetable I am!”

And I still don’t. Even now, I never know what to say. English-Native American-Russian-Swiss-Scottish-ish-stuff? I’m not a vegetable. I’m a melting pot, and even then my cultural identity runs deeper than the blood in my veins. I love reading picture books with my Russian relatives, talking on the phone to my cousins from Swaziland, eating my Indian grandmother’s once-a-year home-cooked curry.

To say that people “don’t mix” seems ridiculous. Of course they “mix.” I may be blonde and pale, but I’m proud that my Native American skin tans in the summer. I’m always surprised if I go home with a friend and their parents aren’t speaking a different language, because that is what I’m familiar with.

But it was only recently, when listening to a conference call prior to my trip to Israel over winter break, that I heard those words again: “Israel isn’t like America. It’s not a melting pot, but a salad bowl.”

I immediately turned to my mom and rolled my eyes. Yeah, salad bowl and not mixing and all of that jazz. Right.

Yet, after spending time in the country, I now understand.

Spend a day in the Old City in Jerusalem, as I did with the group I was traveling with, and you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. I was struck by the city’s beauty and diversity.

Mid-afternoon on a Friday, I entered the Jewish quarter and saw bread for Shabbat in crates, little boys donning kippot, running after their fathers calling out “Abba, abba!” and the omnipresent cats of Israel slinking around buildings, chewing up leftover falafel forgotten on cobblestone pavement. I wandered to the Western Wall, the Wailing Wall, and saw Ultra-Orthodox Jewish men, peyot twisted during hours spent in prayer, head bowed over the Torah. And I observed the women of the wall who also diligently prayed, tears bringing life to worship, who wouldn’t turn their backs to the wall but instead reverently backed away, step by step.

I saw the Dome of the Rock, glimmering there over the horizon. I heard the calls to prayer resonating, beautiful and spiritual. The irresistible warble drew eyes upward to that ethereal gold dome and the mosque beside it.

Then, I went into the Muslim quarter, and I didn’t need a map to know I had arrived. The signs changed to Arabic, and a cacophony of spices hung heavy in the air.  everything tempted the senses: the piles of fresh fruit in carts, aromatic street food, the music and voices.

In the Christian quarter, the signs are partially in Hebrew, partially in Arabic. I saw the sky above, the flags flying over the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. I stepped inside and found yet another iteration of faith: pilgrims kissing the stone of anointing in reverent prayer, seeking transportation to a heavenly realm through proper placement of the corporeal body.

So how can I say anything else? Who then are the people of Israel if not the inhabitants of a salad bowl? If Israel is the “Jewish nation,” what does that mean? The home for the Jewish people, religiously or culturally? What then for its Muslim and Christian inhabitants? They have a place in society, yet separate, in their own schools, marriages, neighborhoods — their own lives. Fall in love with someone from a different faith? Hop a plane to Cyprus or Prague — you won’t find someone to marry you here.

What then for peace? How do you generalize the issues of a conflict between people that cannot exist within the confines of generalization? How do you categorize the opinions of the Israeli people? Of the Palestinians? Intense cultural and religious ties are what makes the people so admirable and the situation so complicated.

Who then are the people who reside in this Holy Land?  Israeli. Palestinian. Secular Jewish Israeli. Armenian Israeli Christian. Palestinian Arab Israeli Muslim. They were the oppressed, are the oppressed, and they seek a home — all of them.

Being in Israel was comfortable to me. I, child of the melting pot, am comfortable being alienated from my “American” culture — whatever that means. I went, I saw, I observed. Everyone I spoke with wanted peace, but not everyone thought it was possible. After thousands of years of oppression, how do you give up the one identity to which you have clung and become first and foremost the citizen of a nation that is young enough to be your child? I honestly haven’t a clue.

And so I sit here, like the small wide-eyed child that I was in fifth grade and ask myself, if I were to live in Israel, which vegetable would I be?

Contact Megan Messerly at mmesserly@dailycal.org.

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Now, having entered my junior year of college, things are getting real. Some serious couples are starting to form around me (I’m secretly scared they might actually get married), and my parents are sneakily poking at me: “Do you have anyone you’re seeing?” I never have a problem with giving them a straight-up “no,” but the fact that they’re asking such questions doesn’t seem like a good sign. My dad, who has always been the type to tell me to stay away from boys, suddenly declared that he’s expecting me to get married within the next five years. That’s a scary thought indeed.

Apparently, I’m not the only one who started thinking about marriage. It is a topic that sometimes awkwardly finds its way into random conversations with my close friends. I often get pleasantly surprised to find that guys think about marriage too. But even as we talk about marriage among ourselves, there always seems to be a sense of fear — fear of the unknown, the unpredictable, what is to come, probably — that ends our conversations with ellipses.

As a college student myself, I can attest to how much the future stresses students out. It took me a whole year and half to settle on a major, only to realize that it wasn’t quite what I was looking for. Now, as a junior, I’m sitting on needles as I apply to and hear back from companies for summer internships. But marriage is a lot more serious than finding a major and a lot more complicated than applying for jobs. People are much more fragile, fickle and unpredictable than the economy, and a marriage is much more permanent than a career. Plus, you have to be in love with that person, whatever that means.

This is probably how the hookup culture got started. Since it’s too much stress to find that one person to be with “until death do (you) apart,” we find an alternative option that requires little to no responsibility whatsoever. It sure feeds the hormones with quick and noncommittal emotions and sex. It’s also the perfect option for this fast-paced 21st-century lifestyle, in which no one really wants to be too committed to anything, because everyone is committed to so many other things that are just as important.

So, what does marriage mean to those of us who live in the hookup generation?

We are so accustomed to single-use cups, bags, utensils, water bottles, price tags, makeup removers, contact lenses. Some of us don’t even wear our clothes and shoes for more than a few years. We’re obviously getting too used to the idea that we can conveniently throw out things that stop working and get new ones to replace them.

So my question for you, then, is this: Is marriage going out-of-date? I wouldn’t be surprised if 20 years down the road, people just stop getting married and live the hookup lifestyle for the rest of their lives — in fact, it’s already happening in some places.

There’s always that “awww” moment when you see an old couple, each member with white or no hair, who are celebrating their 70th anniversary — you know, those girls who were sitting behind you going “awww” when you were watching the animated movie “Up” in the theatre. “That’s so sweet,” people say. Nope, I’m sure the 70 years of living with each other wasn’t all butterflies, and I’m pretty sure there were more bitter days than sweet ones, as can be seen from my own parents’ celebration of 20 years of marriage a few years ago.

But the fact that they endured through the bitter times together, that they still chose to stick together in trust, that they saw each other mature through their own inhibitions and weaknesses — that’s romantic.

So you can see why I am hesitant about marriages. They are — or at least used to be — associated with a sense of permanence that is unusual in today’s world. But maybe that’s not so scary after all.

Editor’s Note: Sex on Tuesday will return Feb. 12.

The post Off the beat: Till death do us part appeared first on The Daily Californian.

My second experience came in my junior year of high school with the father of one of my oldest childhood friends. Shoveling frozen dirt onto his coffin wasn’t the hardest part of the day we buried him. It was watching my friend’s blank, bewildered face as he said that he didn’t know how he would dress up anymore because his father had always tied his tie.

My third experience came just before finals during freshman year, when my dad and mom explained why one of my old high school teachers had stopped writing. It was strange, because his letters, full as they were of his jokes, knowledge and challenges — “The brilliant mind must constantly be honed to the finest edge,” he once told me, equal parts earnest and serious, and he always did his part — never lost their edge, right up to the end. I didn’t come to terms with it until two months later at a campsite in South Africa, where I cried when my dad told me sometimes we just don’t know why.

My fourth experience with suicide did not involve a mentor, a friend or even an acquaintance. Because I did not know he existed before his death on May 8, 2012, Henry Treadway falling from a Unit 2 residence hall window should not have affected me the way it did. Yet it felt like a physical blow. His apparent suicide ripped the scar tissue off the two-year-old tragedy of my teacher.

I learned that suicide rocks me like no other form of passing. That someone deemed himself unworthy of the world in which we live cuts in an intensely personal way. When it is a friend, it hurts exponentially more. But degrees of separation do not diminish the pain entirely. Each occurrence of suicide, however distant, brings the emotions I felt those first times straight to the surface.

One, of course, is grief. Death saddens, except when appropriate. Suicide is never appropriate.

Another is anger. Suicide is a selfish act. It is undertaken for the satisfaction of the self, at complete disregard for others. Those others, the family and friends, colleagues and community members, are left with nothing but a body to bury and a complete absence of joy, as if it were all interred along with the corpse. Only guilt remains.

The guilt overwhelms and suffocates. When my high school teacher died, I constantly ran through what I could have done to keep him alive. A phone call. Another letter. Perhaps a national team jersey, like the one he gave me for my trip to the World Cup. I ran through the same list six months after his death when I spoke at his remembrance. This train of thought, and the guilt accompanying it, resurfaces every time I hear about a suicide; hence the intensity of my reaction to Treadway’s death. I know now that I will never achieve closure. A friend telling you that he no longer wants to be around is a wound from which you never recover.

Macabre and emotional as this may be, it is important to delineate openly and unsparingly so that we can adequately address the suicide that occurred just one month ago. Or, should I say, suicide hoax. Or, should I say — who knows?

On the evening of Dec. 3, whispers floated of another UC Berkeley suicide, this time by the moderator of the UC Berkeley Compliments Facebook page. I felt the same way I did after Treadway’s death. Apparently, and to their credit, others did as well: An outpouring of support occurred online, and the ASUC quickly arranged a memorial service. It seemed our community would deal with it as well as we dealt with Treadway’s death.

But suddenly, organizers canceled the memorial. The Daily Cal could not confirm the suicide. The campus could not. Nor could the ASUC. An anonymous poster on the UC Berkeley Compliments page — one can only assume a friend of the allegedly dead girl — adopted a defiant and defensive tone to defend the privacy of said girl. Then everyone left for winter break, and the entire subject has since disappeared from campus dialogue.

This must change. Something so traumatic cannot exist in perpetuity under this fog. If it is a hoax, let it be named as such. If it is not, then let us know what happened so that we may celebrate her life properly. This is not a call for public humiliation, either way, but for closure — a closure, as I have learned already, that will never be complete.

Contact Jordan Bach-Lombardo at jbachlombardo@dailycal.org.

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I turned to what seemed like a ridiculous and illogical alternative to earn a bit of spare change — stuffing facts such as “Who is the inventor of frozen food?” and “Who is the running back with the biggest margin of victory in Heisman trophy voting history?” in preparation to earn a bid to Jeopardy!, America’s favorite quiz show (the answers: Clarence Birdseye and O.J. Simpson, respectively).

I took the online test — the first step to making it onto the show — in the spring, moved on to have a blast of a summer, and then spent the past fall semester in Washington, D.C., having another blast but working at what I had vowed to avoid: an unpaid internship.

Since then, two things have occurred: I have renewed my oath to never again work unpaid, and I’ve received a callback to the second round of auditions for Jeopardy! As you can tell, one of these things is far more exciting than the other. Yep you guessed it — my oath was done in blood, thereby making it irrevocable.

As for my callback to Jeopardy!, I nearly suffered the fate of Tycho Brahe — a burst bladder — when I found out I would be moving on to the next round (lesson learned: go to the “loo”, or as the Aussies say, “dunny”, before you check your email for quiz show news).

You’re probably thinking that my immediate reaction was to cram my brain with as much trivia as possible or come up with cutesy things I could talk to Alex Trebek about after the first commercial break. What I was really thinking was “Why did I spend all those hours slaving away at my internship when I could have been memorizing facts such as “Rene Descartes had a fetish for cross-eyed women” instead?”

Something I’ve come to realize this past semester is that we college students are far too apoplectic when it comes to finding internships and resume boosters. We stress, we worry, we sweat … for what, really?

My internship in D.C. consisted of doing basic, non-intellectually stimulating tasks for a solid 36 hours a week. As I went through what seemed like eons of work for no compensation, I realized that not only was I wasting my time, but I was also intellectually regressing. As students, we must be constantly striving to learn more, better our abilities or improve our skills. Otherwise, we’ll find ourselves stagnating as the rest of the world speeds past.

I understand this may not apply to everyone. One of my engineering friends recently asked how my internship in D.C. was and I told her how it sucks to be unpaid, to which she replied, “Wait, aren’t all internships paid, though? I always get paid A LOT for the work I do.” I cried.

I know, internships are important stepping stones to employment down the line, and if you’re able to find something worthwhile, go for it. But if you find yourself facing a situation where you’re going to be earning zero dollars, you’ll be doing nothing but grunt work, you’ll be forced to fetch coffee regularly, I tell you this — it’s just not worth it (speaking of which, did you know that George Washington was the inventor of instant coffee? Not the GW that we know as an American hero, but a Belgian by the same name, living in Guatemala in 1906).

Study abroad, try something new, or get outside your comfort zone; perfect your craft, whatever it may be, so that when opportunities do arise, you will crush them like an elephant jumping on ants. Psyche! Elephants can’t jump.

Whatever you do though, remember this: you are worth being paid for your services. You go to UC Berkeley, for God’s sake. Don’t give up your talents, your brain, your skills and your time for nothing in return, unless it’s Jon Stewart asking for them. You are not worth nothing. So don’t let employers avoid this fundamental truth by offering you “academic credit” instead.

Or you can try out for Jeopardy! There is a 0.01 percent chance that I move on, but I know that regardless of if I make the show, I will not spend this spring semester losing sleep over whether this or that company calls me back. If they do, great. If they don’t, they can … well, they can go hang out in Death Valley, the hottest place on Earth with record temperatures of 134 degrees.

As of right now, I’m far more concerned with what the small plastic tag at the end of a shoelace is called.

Ah yes, that’d be “What is an aglet?”

Contact Lynn Yu at lyu@dailycal.org.

The post Off the beat: What is … worth it? appeared first on The Daily Californian.

When it comes to freshmen, perhaps the most popular assumptions are embedded in the very word itself. “Freshman” means more than the word’s literal definition of being a first-year student — it also has connotations of being naive and idealistic.

However, the idea that new students are inexperienced too often brings forth the idea that we can make judgments about how much new students can accomplish at schools like UC Berkeley.

When I was a freshman, I remember being in an upper-division course and not knowing that I was the only first-year in a class with more than 100 students. As I realized my class standing in comparison to other students, I began to question my place in the course. If everyone else was majoring in that field and had at least two years of college experience, how was my performance going to compare?

Yet midway through the class, I realized this was a very unfortunate way of thinking. I had believed that my lack of college experience placed me at a disadvantage without further thought, but my good performance on course projects proved to me that I could compete with my peers.

The real setback would have been to not try, to let assumptions guide my mindset while studying and to let myths dictate the outcome of my transcript.

Believing that freshmen can’t perform as well as upperclassmen, I realized, is a flawed generalization. Part of this quick judgment comes from very old deductions about how experience helps us learn. While this may be true in many cases, it can be beneficial to embrace the freshman mindset throughout college and remember the goals that drove us when we entered UC Berkeley.

As all incoming students would say, they have goals. Many of us dream of making an impact on the world and on campus, all the while getting straight A’s like that roll down 4.0 hill had promised us. While these dreams are neither modest nor easy to achieve, they are not impossible, either.

Yet at any time or place, someone seems ready to say that these dreams are overambitious. Yes, things might not always work out the way we planned, but our college experiences shouldn’t make us expect the worst every time, either.

But why do we forget some of our freshman goals? Maybe it’s because of experience itself. While it’s harder to be the best at UC Berkeley than it is elsewhere, we ought to think less with generalizations and start thinking about the “freshness” of the situations we are presented with. More importantly, we ought not let our freshman ambitions be forgotten in the same way as our New Year’s resolutions.

As a freshman, I remember being so excited about my courses that I would check Tele-BEARS to read over my schedule and fantasize about what it would be like going to college. Now, no longer a freshman, I know what classes and their assignments might be like. I have grown used to the intense level of college reading, and I’m familiar with the finals rush. I have loved my classes, but I had lost the exciting anticipation of being a new student.

However, I spent this winter break in Lima, Peru, and the northern part of the country. After not speaking English for an entire month, I began to miss California and the rigor of my college schedule. Once again, I found myself daydreaming about walking through Berkeley and seeing my friends. It reminded me of how I felt as a freshman envisioning how college would turn out.

By just regaining that anticipation about college, I have more energy to pursue my classes, and I no longer see them as predictable but as unique experiences that I can improve upon each semester. In the same way, I can apply the mentality of being a freshman to life outside the classroom. Student-group tabling and fliering may have lost their original appeal, but it’s never too late to try new things.

When I entered college, I was excited to meet new people who shared my interests, in both academics and extracurricular activities. For an upperclassman, it’s easy to take for granted that there are thousands of students on campus. UC Berkeley is an incredibly diverse school, and because of that, meeting new people can change your outlook on campus.

We shouldn’t let being a sophomore or junior or senior make us complacent. Every semester is a new semester, with new classes and new expectations.

Contact Jacqueline Alas at jalas@dailycal.org.

The post Off the beat: Think like a freshman appeared first on The Daily Californian.