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By Ayala Ochert As it has done every year since 1871, in May the campus presented the University Medal to a graduating senior. This year the award went to Ankur Luthra, who was profiled in the Monthly in February, when he became the first Berkeley student in over a decade to win a Rhodes scholarship. With his flawless transcript and service to Cal and the wider community, Ankur was judged the "best" of the nearly 7,000 members of the Class of 2003. But, as Ankur would be the first to say, the remarkable thing about Berkeley is that there is no shortage of extraordinary people like him. We spoke to five other graduating seniors, all high achievers academically who also have much more to offer the world. Among them we found a woman who plans to break down a stereotype by becoming a mathematician, a Latino student who is determined that his whole community should benefit from his Berkeley education, and a woman who overcame unbelievable odds to become one of the four finalists for the University Medal. Best foot forward  Most people would not put "washing homeless people's feet" high up on their list of things they enjoyed most at college. But Aisha Baqia is not most people. She insists she really does enjoy sitting down with a bowl of warm soapy water and greeting the people who come into the student-run Suitcase Clinic, where the homeless can have their feet washed or receive free medical and legal services. "People are people," she explains. Sure, sometimes her clients have smelly feet, but then "everyone has smelly feet sometimes." Aisha chose foot-washing because it's a "hands-on activity." "It's more personal, too. You get to talk to the clients and help them relax--it's just a small part of the day when they can feel pampered, which is a rare opportunity for them." When Aisha says she plans to become a doctor, it's obviously for the right reason: She simply cares about people--if they feel bad, she wants to make them better. When she's not helping the homeless, she might be at the Alta Bates Medical Center, visiting long-term residential patients. These are people who don't get many visitors, so they really appreciate it when Aisha comes along once a week to talk to them, massage their hands, or just sit by their beds. Although she's not involved in their medical care, Aisha says she's learned a lot at Alta Bates about what it means to be a good doctor. "It's made me realize what a difference it makes for patients to know that you care," she says. "A lot of times medicine is very impersonal, very fast, rapid--do what you need to do and then leave. When I'm a doctor, I want to be really involved with my patients." Aisha cares about her fellow students, too. As a peer educator for the Sexuality and Health Education program at the Tang Center, she talks to young women coming in for their first pelvic exams and helps them overcome their nerves. As well as offering her opportunities to help others, Berkeley also helped Aisha come out of her shell. She grew up in Victorville, a conservative town in the Mojave Desert. Although her father is Pakistani and her mother is Thai, Victorville "wasn't the most diverse place you could live," and Aisha was attracted to Berkeley in part because it was the "polar opposite" of her home town. "Seeing everyone express their opinion has definitely made me more vocal. At Berkeley, I've also learned the importance of keeping an open mind and to never stop learning." Broader minded  Garrick Trapp grew up in Long Beach, where he attended the same high school as rap artist Snoop Dogg. Like the rapper, Garrick plans to pursue a career in music. But he plays viola, percussion, and classical guitar and dreams not of being a rapper but of conducting an orchestra. When he came to Berkeley, Garrick could have done the obvious thing and majored in music. "But I didn't want to just be a music geek and spend my whole life doing music and not be aware of anything else," he says. "I wanted the broadest education I could get." The self-effacing Garrick credits Chancellor Berdahl with putting this idea in his head. "It was at a luncheon during my first semester. He told us: 'You've got to take Berkeley and just strangle it and get whatever you can out of it,'" he recalls. "So that's been my goal, to get whatever I can out of the school." Garrick decided he would double major in a science subject and a humanities subject, and says he would have triple majored in music, if it had been possible. He chose astrophysics (even though he'd never studied physics before) and comparative literature (even though he thought he was "no good" at English and Spanish in high school). And in case there was anything he might be missing, Garrick audited as many classes as he could--Latin, conducting, Greek art, and poetry, to name just a few. But he always made time for his great passion: music. He's been a regular performer in the UC Orchestra, and plans to go to graduate school for music, applying to Juilliard's extremely competitive course for conductors. Although he doesn't yet have much experience as a conductor, he imagines he'd make a pretty good one: "I have a really good ear. I know how things should go, and I'm pretty good at predicting the way the music should end up. I know what I'm listening to a measure or so before it happens." Outside of school work and music, Garrick enjoys volunteering as a swim instructor for children with special needs. Watching them make progress and enjoy themselves gives him a similar feeling to the one he gets when performing. "I feel I really want to do music because it moves me, and I want to be able to move other people. This is the same," he says. Fruits of his labor  On his 14th birthday, Alberto Vazquez was woken at 5:30 a.m. by his father, who told Alberto he was coming to work. Born in Mexico, Alberto's father was a manual laborer in Oakland, and for the next eight hours Alberto hauled heavy boxes in a cold warehouse. At the end of the day, his father handed him a $20 bill. "Not much, huh?" he said. "Suppose you had to support a wife and four kids on that kind of pay. You have a choice: You can go to school and get a good education, or you can work like this for the rest of your life." It was a lesson that changed Alberto's life. He had been interested in school before then, but was by no means an A-student. Afterwards, school became his top priority, and his grades shot up dramatically. "I realized that school wasn't that hard if you just read and study," says Alberto, who also enjoyed the attention that came with being one the top students in his school. Not long after, Alberto was introduced to the idea of college through an Upward Bound program held on the Berkeley campus. Even though he went to a high school in East Oakland not known for its academic excellence, Alberto says that he always felt he would end up attending Berkeley. "I wasn't even worried about it, really," he says. "When I want something, I just go for it, and I'm going to get it. That's what I wanted, and I didn't want to think otherwise." Once he earned admission to Cal, though, he admits he began to get nervous: "I was motivated, but scared." Fortunately, Alberto was among the first 15 students to receive a scholarship through The Achievement Award Program (TAAP)--CAA's new award given to low-income students who have qualified for admission to Berkeley. The scholarship meant that he wouldn't have to work during the school year and could focus on his studies. But Alberto and his fellow Achievement Award scholars were determined to do more than that. They wanted to pass on the benefits of their education at Cal, so they set up a community program--visiting homeless shelters and homes for battered women, and helping with Cal outreach events--as well as a mentoring program to help motivate middle-school students in Oakland. Working to better his community is nothing new to Alberto. In the fifth grade, frustrated by the lack of a safe place in his neighborhood for kids to play, he set up a local community organization and raised enough money to fix up a run-down basketball court and church parking lot. They even planted a small vegetable garden and donated the produce to a homeless shelter. At Berkeley, Alberto majored in business administration and minored in ethnic studies. (Why business? "I grew up poor, and I didn't want to be poor anymore.") He's planning a career in the entertainment business, but once he's "made it" he intends to return to his community. "I have a lot of friends, and all they can do is clean houses," says Alberto, who hopes to open a nonprofit to support the education of Latina women. "If they're not educated about school and trained in something besides cleaning houses, then the cycle will continue," explains Alberto. "I want to end the cycle." Counting her chickens  Give her a choice between two paths, and Megan McClean will probably take the third. Why take the road less traveled, she'd ask, when you can go cross-country? Megan grew up on her family's five-acre plot in rural Clovis. Her parents began homeschooling Megan when she reached fourth grade. They also encouraged her to become involved in 4-H; and, along with the family's animals, Megan raised her own goats, chickens, and rabbits. While most kids her age were struggling through middle school, Megan had already enrolled in classes at the local junior college. She bypassed high school altogether and, at 13 years old, was the youngest full-time student at Fresno City College. "Both my parents are lawyers, and I didn't really know what else you did with your life besides become a lawyer, a doctor, a teacher," she recalls. She considered medicine, then engineering, before finally taking that third path--mathematics. There was no precedent for it: her parents were both liberal arts majors without much interest in the subject, and Megan says that she was "taught to hate math" in elementary school by a teacher who didn't really understand it herself. But a favorite professor at Fresno City College took Megan aside one day and said: "You know, you'll never be rich, but you should do math because it's really interesting." "That got me thinking," she says. "I took every math class they offered and really fell in love with it." At 18, Megan transferred to Berkeley as an applied math major. Determined to have the "Big U" experience, she played rugby for two years; she joined a sorority--Sigma Kappa, becoming vice president for new members; and she did her own research, a mathematical biology project, for her honors thesis. None of Megan's math professors at Cal was a woman, and she's never really found a female role model in math--something she is trying to change for younger girls by mentoring in science and math at local high schools. After graduate school (she's off to Harvard in the fall), she hopes to carve out another new path for herself, combining her love for the country and her love for math. "An ideal would be, once UC Merced opens up, to get a job there. Then I can still live in the Central Valley and have my agricultural projects on the side." Paradigm shift  Sara Davis-Eisenman was born in Sioux City, Iowa to two highly intelligent parents. Unfortunately, both suffered from severe mental illness--her father was schizophrenic, her mother had bipolar disorder--and by the time Sara was 11, her mother had become too ill to take care of her. So Sara was shipped off to southern California, where her sister lived, and spent her teenage years in an endless series of foster homes. "By the time I was 17 or 18 years old, I had lived in about 25 different places," she recalls. Most young people leaving foster care struggle to simply get by in the world, but Sara managed to do much more. She came to Berkeley and excelled. She earned her degree in just three and a half years, with a 3.99 GPA, and became one of four finalists for the University Medal, the highest honor given to an undergraduate. Growing up, school was her salvation. "From the time I was very little, I found a home in learning," she says. "My teachers were my mentors and, as things became more difficult in my life, it was a safe space for me to be." Thousands of miles away from her family, Sara quickly learned to take care of herself. She began waiting tables at 14; after high school she took several jobs, sending spare money back home. She bootstrapped her way into better-paid office work by training herself in computers, but after several years realized she was in a dead-end. The idea of going back to school was a "mental paradigm shift," says Sara. But once she'd made that shift, she knew that Berkeley was the place for her--in part because of its academic reputation and in part because that was where her old high school sweetheart had gone. (The two had lost touch in the intervening years, but they bumped into each other again at a New Year's Eve party in 1999. They married shortly before she came to Berkeley.) She is interested in everything--astronomy, art, history, psychology, philosophy, dance. "I'm a Renaissance person born about 400 or 500 years too late!" she jokes. "I just see the interconnections between all these things." In the end she majored in cognitive science because it's "right at the crossroads between the humanities and the sciences." She took part in various research projects, including one with world-renowned philosopher John Searle on the neuroscientific basis of free will. One summer, she went on an archaeological dig in Israel in the Dead Sea Scrolls caves, where her group unearthed exciting new findings that were published in Time magazine. Art and dance in particular have been a form of therapy for Sara. "I have a lot of emotions in my life, really deep things that don't express themselves well in words. All of those things that don't fit into words fit into dance," she says. "For me, dance is a form of personal expression." Despite the hardships that she has endured in life, Sara does not seem bitter or worn down. "My mom always says to me: 'You did everything that I wanted to but couldn't,'" says Sara. Graduate school is next on her agenda, and she hopes to do research that will improve the understanding of mental illness, giving her parents even more reason to be proud. |
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