Students

In this first-person narrative, Yesenia Ochoa, a first-year student at UC Berkeley, tells UC Berkeley News about her experience being a student from a migrant family and her educational aspirations.

“I grew up in Yuba City. My parents immigrated there from a little village on the side of a hill called Las Estacas in Michoacan, Mexico, when they were 23. They work in the fields — agriculture is a huge industry in the region — so they leave really early in the morning to harvest peaches, walnuts, tomatoes, almonds, almond fields, things like that.

As teenagers...

MCB postdoc Akanksha Thawani (Nogales & Collins Labs) was selected as a 2024 STAT Wunderkind. This award recognizes Thawani as an outstanding early-career scientist and is for her research on unraveling the mysteries of ‘the next CRISPR’.

For UC Berkeley Political Science graduate student Dinah Lawan, April 14, 2014, was a night she will never forget. Lawan went through the terrifying ordeal of being a kidnapping victim of Boko Haram, and later escaped to pursue higher education in the U.S.

Today, as she works towards her doctorate to help those suffering in conflict zones, Lawan recalls how the kidnapping changed her life forever.

Soldiers Arrived
Lawan, who was 15 years old and in her final year of high school at the time, spent that...

Top philosophy graduate students from around the world are finding their way to UC Berkeley thanks to a recently established fellowship that enriches the discipline with new approaches.

The fellowship honors Carol Lee Price, a Berkeley alum who led a curiosity-driven life. Price was born in Cleveland to a Jewish family that emphasized education as an object of value that no one could take away. Whenever she moved, she took the knowledge she had gained with her.

Price found a home at Berkeley, where she majored in...