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By Carolyn Jones A degree from Cal can open doors to just about any opportunity imaginable. It can be a ticket to a top graduate school or a lucrative career, and open up an immense, worldwide network of friends and business connections. A degree from Cal is recession-proof, trend-proof, and fool-proof. It is not, however, weird-proof. Cal grads can be found in the remotest corners of the job market, doing everything from piloting the Oscar Meyer Wienermobile to reigning over a large Scandinavian country. Maybe it’s a tribute to Cal graduates’ creativity, open-mindedness, and adaptability. Where some see dead ends, Berkeley alums see possibilities—and a good story to tell later. My brother, Michael Jones ’81, for example, has built a small empire writing reports about bike paths. My sister, Cynthia Jones Rogerson ’79, has done everything from farm work to publishing a novel, all within the past month. At one point, she was paid by the British government to walk up and down trains reading poetry aloud to weary commuters, a task so embarrassing she has a permanent cringe. My own employment history is like a dirigible that never quite cleared the runway. At one point I was the society reporter of Tuolumne County, covering such notable events as a retired cafeteria worker from Modesto raising a 35-pound cantaloupe, and a sunbathing woman rendered unconscious by a falling pine cone. (In retrospect, that may actually have been the high point of my career. Now a shut-in housewife and mom, I cut a swath through the dog hair to pick up puzzle pieces from the floor and scrape petrified yogurt off the walls. And that’s on a productive day.) Perhaps all of us can find comfort in the wide range of occupations held by Cal graduates. Here’s a look at a few alums who’ve forayed into truly different employment. Buns of steel There’s no delicate or euphemistic way to describe the job held by Eduardo Nuñez ’01. He’s not an “executive assistant” or “sales associate” or even the all-purpose “consultant.” On his resume, his first job after college will always be: “Driver, Wienermobile.” Nuñez, whose degree is in social welfare, is spending his first six months after graduation piloting a 27-foot-long hot dog across the country. He and his Wienermates stop at grocery stores, children’s hospitals, and community centers to audition kids for a Spanish version of the “I’m an Oscar Meyer Wiener” TV commercial.  “It’s buns of fun, as we say in the Wienermobile,’’ laughs Nuñez, a Union City native. Nuñez says the job isn’t totally unrelated to his career goals. Eventually, he’d like to teach or work in the nonprofit sector with inner-city kids—thousands of whom have belted out their own hopeful renditions of the Wiener jingle with Nuñez’s gentle encouragement. But he took the job primarily because he gets paid to travel—every student’s dream, even if it is in a giant sausage. So far, he’s cruised through most of the Great Plains and the Eastern seaboard, waving at gawking motorists and posing for pictures. The Wienermobile is, to say the least, unwieldy. It’s 11 feet high, 8 feet wide, and drives like a “very fat Suburban,” he says. But when it pulls into a grocery store parking lot, it might as well be the Good Ship Lollipop. “Once we open the door, people run to us,” he says. “People love the Wienermobile.” For Nuñez, the only downside to life in the wiener lane is that he’s away from Berkeley—a town the Wienermobile will probably never visit. The Berkeley Department of Parking would not look kindly upon a double-parked non-soy hot dog.
At the other end of the first-job-out-of-college scale is Haakon Magnus ’99. He’s the crown prince of Norway. Magnus, 28, has been well noted for his free-wheeling ways—going to hip-hop concerts, wandering around Oslo in jeans and a sweater, and generally bucking the traditions of monarchy. In August, Magnus married Mette-Marit Tjessem Hoiby, who has a 4-year-old son from a previous relationship and for many years was part of Oslo’s party scene. Magnus’s role as iconoclast started when he chose Berkeley, bypassing Oxford, where Norwegian royals are supposedto go, and fancy private U.S. schools like Stanford. “I wanted to study abroad and see a different perspective of international politics. I chose Berkeley because it’s a brilliant university and its students are very diverse,” Magnus said. He also wanted to study where he’d blend in with the student population. While living at International House, he turned down the chance to have his own apartment, opting instead to live with a roommate. As it turned out, his roommate was an American of Cuban descent who turned the Norwegian prince on to salsa dancing. Magnus, a political science major, brought a bit of Berkeley’s tolerance back to Norway. Since graduating, he’s taken up the cause of Norway’s indigenous Lapplander population, and has been a crusader for gay and women’s rights. Magnus and his new wife are immensely popular with the younger generation in Norway, but it could be a while before Magnus assumes the throne. His father, King Olav, took over only 10 years ago and is a spry 53. In the meantime, maybe Magnus can organize an alumni club in Oslo. Starting small When she was at Cal as a fine arts major, Leslie Buck’s tools were paintbrushes and easels. Now they’re pruning shears and miniature saws: Buck ’88 has taken her arts training and let it loose on the garden. But she’s not a landscaper, or an arborist, or a gardener. She’s a pruner. “I only do pruning on small trees and shrubs. That’s it,” she says. “It’s an unusual occupation, but in Japan, it’s a lot more common. There, they don’t consider a garden complete until it’s had eight years of pruning.” Buck, a native of Oklahoma City now living in Berkeley, has more than a hundred clients in the Berkeley and Oakland hills, Marin, and Atherton. She makes a pretty good living as a full-time pruner, and she turns away three or four new customers a week. The point of Japanese-style pruning, she said, is to sculpt a tree to match its setting. For example, an olive tree could be pruned to look like an old olive tree in the Italian countryside. Or a maple tree could be pruned to lean over a rock garden, reminiscent of the trees above the waterfalls in Yosemite. “Pruning gives direction to the whole garden,” she says. Buck actually has held two consecutive odd jobs. Before she became a pruner, she spent seven years at Doe Library repairing books. It was boredom with book repairing that led her to pursue her true passion, gardening. And she would have made a career as a gardener, but discovered she was allergic to…dirt. And there’s only one gardening task that doesn’t involve dirt, and that’s pruning. Buck took pruning and bonsai classes at Merritt College in Oakland from Dennis Makishima, who later became her mentor. He taught her everything about the aesthetics, design nuances, technical aspects, and business of pruning. She even served as an apprentice pruner for a landscape company in Kyoto, Japan. But her own garden is no masterpiece. “I have a very small native plant garden,” she says. “But I have very little time.”
Hot stuff The first thing James Hong ’95, MBA ’99, will tell you about his Web site is, “It’s clean. I swear.” Hotornot.com just sounds pornographic. But there’s nothing raunchy about it, insist its creators, Hong and his roommate Jim Young ’94. It is, they say, “a meeting site.” All this sounds a long way from the usual pursuits of electrical engineering and computer science majors from Cal, but the site is one of the hottest things on the Web. (There are even strange rival offspring, like geekornot.com.) At Hotornot.com, visitors post their own or friends’ snapshots, with brief descriptions of their personality, for others to rate, on a scale of one to 10. If you see someone on the site you like, you can send them an e-mail message. It’s like computerized personal ads. According to testimonials posted on the site, thousands of couples have met through Hotornot.com and some have even gotten married. During a cursory check by California Monthly, all candidates for hotness were fully clothed. In fact, they didn’t even look like super models. They looked, well, like computer science and electrical engineering majors. The idea started out as a joke. Last October, Hong and Young were sharing a few beers and talking about girls at their Mountain View home, when they decided to build a Web site that does pretty much that—allow visitors to check out guys and gals, minus the beer. Three days after they launched it, they got a call from the on-line magazine Salon.com. The pair was horrified. In fact, Hong was so embarrassed that for months he only consented to be interviewed anonymously. But the attention kept pouring in. After Salon.com came the London Observer, the New York Times, Newsweek, Time, People, and Entertainment Weekly. Now Hotornot.com gets more than a million visitors a month, making it one of the Web’s busiest sites. “Within the tech community it really spread,” Hong says. Still, the founders haven’t abandoned their day jobs. Young is working on his Ph.D. in electrical engineering at Cal, and Hong works for a start-up. They say that, despite its success, Hotornot.com is not their ultimate career goal. “We’re these double-E guys. We have no business doing this,” Hong says with a laugh.
Farms in Berkeley? How about a Berkeleyan on the Farm? That’s where Brian Chan ’78 landed. Chan, a Cal basketball fanatic, left his job as chief financial officer at the California Alumni Association in 1995 to fill the same role at the Stanford Alumni Association—a move, he says, that sounds a lot stranger than it actually is. For one thing, there’s no shortage of Cal folk wandering among the dry grass and squat stucco buildings down in Palo Alto. The campus is blessed with a healthy population of grad students and faculty whose roots are blue and gold. Secondly, Stanford people are generally good about suppressing their envy of their Cal colleagues. All of which makes Chan’s job, in the hotbed of Cardinal boosterism, a lot more tolerable. “It’s a friendly rivalry—sometimes more friendly on the Stanford side than on the Cal side,” Chan confides. But, despite the fact that he grew up on the Peninsula and is now on the Stanford payroll, Chan still roots for the Bears. “I’ve lost too many Big Game bets since I’ve been here,” he laments. When told of his company in the “odd jobs” department, he says, “I work at Stanford, but my job in itself is not odd or unusual.’’ He adds: “I think driving a Wienermobile sounds like much more fun.” |
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