Alumni

Last spring, we asked L&S alums to share a piece of advice for new first-year and transfer students at UC Berkeley - thank you to everyone who responded! Here are just a few pieces of wisdom from L&S alums.

Ben Papadopoulos was not your typical Gender and Women’s Studies (GWS) undergraduate student at UC Berkeley. As the only male in his cohort, he found his place at GWS, where he combined his passion for linguistics with a drive to promote gender-inclusive language.

The GWS alumnus, who would go on to earn a Ph.D. from Cal in Spanish Linguistics, wove advocacy into his academic work, as he aims to elevate the voices of trans and nonbinary communities in his research. Despite being one of the few men in his field, Papadopoulos has worked to bridge...

Phuong Le graduated from UC Berkeley's College of Letters & Science with a degree in American Studies. While that may sound straightforward, her path was anything but traditional. After building a strong academic foundation at Berkeley, personal challenges with her mental health and finances ultimately led Phuong to withdraw from school just shy of graduation in 2017.

Over the next five years, Phuong worked tirelessly to overcome these obstacles, which were...

UC Berkeley Sociology Alumnus Martin Eiermann recently published a new book that explores the evolution of privacy, spanning from its emergence as a social norm about domestic life to its endangerment in a world of mass surveillance. It’s titled “The Limiting Principle: How Privacy Became a Public Issue.”

The book maps out the unequal politics of personal data amid a spike in immigration raids. He based it on his award-...