On a sunny summer morning in Sacramento, Janet Mendoza-Partida was walking from her office at the California Department of Education along tree-lined streets to the state Capitol, a thoughtful young woman explaining why she feels divided between two worlds.
Her parents are Mexican immigrants who raised their children in Watsonville — her father a farmworker, her mother a childcare provider. Even a few years ago, before starting studies at UC Berkeley, Mendoza-Partida said she could not see far beyond the agricultural community where she grew up and dreamed of being a teacher....
All year I have been reading articles that paint an apocalyptic picture of humanities instruction in the age of artificial intelligence. They basically...
Angela (she/her) is a 2025 SURF L&S researcher majoring in Psychology and Computer Science. For her SURF project this summer, Angela is researching the topic “EQVision: Affective Tracking of Multiple Characters in Context.”
How did you get interested in the topic of your project?
To promote deeper learning and fairer outcomes, many education systems have moved away from traditional in-class exams toward lower-stakes, more flexible forms of assessment. Yet despite the growing popularity of this shift, we still know little about its long-term consequences. What began as a single in-class exam has evolved into a mix of midterms, finals, take-home tests, re-takes, problem sets, and participation-based grading. In some cases, assessments now depend more on whether students complete their work than how well they perform. This trend has extended beyond the classroom: many...
UC Berkeley’s influence traverses the globe, and thanks to the Judith Stronach Travel Seminar, its creative scholars can as well.
This past November, art history professors Zamansele Nsele and Ivy Mills led a group of six graduate students to Senegal for an immersive, nine-day trip to the 2024 Dak'Art Biennale — a major art exhibition that showcases contemporary African art every other year.
Karla de la Cruz’s path to UC Berkeley was neither linear nor easy. For much of her life, she didn’t even think going to college was a possibility for her – let alone walking the stage at the world’s top public university. She was raised by a single mother who worked long hours as a farmworker in rural Northern California, and few students in her community had the support necessary to go to college.
She beat the odds this week by graduating with a degree in sociology after completing the honors thesis program. During her time at Cal, she also...
This I’m a Berkeleyan was written as a first-person narrative compiled from a UC Berkeley News interview with student Daniela Guadalupe Castellanos, who’s graduating this May.
This is my third year at Berkeley, but I’m graduating already. I am from northeast Sacramento, a really small town, Cameron Park, where there’s nothing really there except McDonald’s.
When I first arrived at Berkeley, I was overwhelmed by impostor syndrome. Back home, every passing smile felt like a reminder that I belonged somewhere. But here, I felt invisible. I could walk across campus, and...
All year I have been reading articles that paint an apocalyptic picture of humanities instruction in the age of artificial intelligence. They 
Angela (she/her) is a 2025 SURF L&S researcher majoring in Psychology and Computer Science. For her SURF project this summer, Angela is researching the topic “EQVision: Affective Tracking of Multiple Characters in Context.”
OURS Student Spotlight: Cathy Kenderski (Fall ’25) | Molecular and Cell Biology 