caresse's pieces

This moment in particular, right after the election, I’m excited to finally have some time to get back to myself. Everything has been a whirlwind since graduation, and some time to be in my own skin is long overdue. I’ll work hard and save up during the week with the internship. Then I’m going to use my weekends to finally get outdoors, do some hiking, read good books, enjoy delicious food, make preparations for my travels.

Then I’ll finally get to the adventure I’ve been waiting for.

Distinguished faculty, friends, and family: Good morning. My fellow graduates of the class of 2016: Congratulations. We have finally made it through the badlands for a very expensive piece of paper and, out of context, a rather funny-looking mortarboard headpiece. When put so plainly, that does sound a bit ridiculous; but most of us here today know that we will be leaving this campus with so much more than that. 

 If you had spoken to me a year ago, I would have told you that it was nearly impossible to imagine myself at commencement, let alone giving a speech – because a year ago I wasn’t even a student at Cal. I had been kicked out. I arrived at Cal in 2013 as a transfer student from a community college in Los Angeles. That first week of classes I remember being bright-eyed and hungry for all of the opportunities the school had to offer, but by the end of my first year here I had been beaten and broken apart. 

In retrospect, I had been overly ambitious. Some of you may have shared this same experience: I not only signed up for too many classes, but the majority of them were physical geography classes. I knew the physical sciences weren’t my strong suit, but I went against my own better judgment with the hope of getting those major requirements out of the way. I ended up finding myself in one of my worst episodes of depression and anxiety, and with a 1.9 GPA – barely missing the 2.0 minimum requirement to maintain student status. So I was dismissed from the school, and for a short moment I thought of never attempting to get back in. 

But as you see me standing here before you, I thankfully went with my better judgment and fought like hell to be readmitted. I worked full-time in the day and spent late nights working to finishing an incomplete in Professor Larsen’s hydrology class. When first taking the class, I was sure that I would fail, but with dedication that had somehow later turned into obsession, I ended up with a B+. I finally found my stride in human geography and aced courses on the urban experience and globalization. It was quite a challenge, but we all know that’s exactly what you sign up for when you decide to go to Cal. It’s like the Tough Mudder of academics. Even with its 14.8% acceptance rate, it is harder to make it out of Berkeley than it is to get in.

Each of us here had to fight one way or another in order earn the silly hats on our heads. I know a few of your faces from spending late nights in Wurster Hall working on our GIS labs. I have seen a lot of you in McCone carrying your 800-page readers around. I kid you not, my reader for my American Cultural Landscapes class was *this* thick, and on top of that we were assigned nine other books to read.

I think people outside of the department have misconceptions about what a geography student actually does. A lot of my friends think we are just oddly passionate about maps and love nature. While this may be true, this is not the whole truth. I will admit to having spent hours at the Earth Sciences & Maps Library looking at topographic and Sanborn fire insurance maps on microfilm just for fun. There’s something about being able to see a location on different scales of time and space to see a bigger picture that can instill a sense of awe in this world. So yes, we do love maps, but the extent of our studies does not only encompass cartography. 

 By applying math, physics, chemistry, and biology in the context of human activities and physical landscapes, our earth systems scientists work to better understand the Earth, its interconnected systems, and what we can do to keep it here. (By the way, climate change is real. We’ve had the science to prove it for years. Please just accept it.) Our human geographers take a critical look at human interaction with nature, the spatial organization of the world’s societies, and how concepts of place, territory, and landscape are produced by the human imagination. These human productions then have large social and economic effects at both local and international scales. I could start talking about the effects of the city grid on the human experience, or how technology has allowed for us to overcome space and time and completely shift international power dynamics… but then this speech would turn into a discussion section, and we’re supposed to be done with those now. 

 This is what I’m going to miss most about my experience at Berkeley. I’m going to miss being around likeminded individuals with a common love and passion for the earth and the people who walk its lands, sail its seas, and fly through (and maybe even out of) its skies. One of the most important things I realized after being readmitted was that though we all may have struggled to get this far, we never had to struggle alone. Not only do we have an incredibly supportive faculty and staff, but contrary to common stereotypes about Berkeley, our fellow students are more collaborative than competitive. As I mentioned earlier, we are leaving with much more than a diploma. We are leaving with shared experiences of curiosity, hard work, and passion.

More importantly, we are leaving well equipped with skills and tools to navigate the many journeys that lie ahead of us. Before this speech gets any longer, I’ll close it out with a most intimate moment of inspiration. I don’t know about you, but I have always found solace in my solitary moments in the bathroom. I have a favorite stall in the women’s restroom on the first floor of McCone. When you walk in, I think it’s the the third stall to the left. I like it because it somehow manages to stay clean, but mostly because it has some pretty great words of advice written on it. It says, “Don’t follow the path set out for you. Race through the unmapped forest, making your own way as you fight through.”

Cutting off my own other on Mother’s Day has been difficult to cope with during finals week, so I need to remind myself of how my hard work has been paying off and pulling through will get me even further.