A brainy night in Berkeley: If it’s Thursday, this must be the corpus callosum. Has anyone seen my homunculus? For the inexperienced traveler, Aubrey Gilbert’s “whirlwind tour of your nervous system” blows past the hippocampus and cortex of the frontal lobes like a five-day package excursion through the great cities of Europe. Looking back, there’s no doubt it's been a remarkable trip, but you’re unsure in which region of the brain you encountered Broca’s area, or the precise location of the olfactory bulb; your most vivid take-home memory is apt to be Gilbert's admonition never, ever to order brains for lunch.
Almost gone, but not forgotten Berkeley’s neighbor to the south, Oakland, has a Chinatown that’s well known to city residents and others who go there to shop, dine, and renew cultural ties. What most don’t know is that a previous Chinatown existed “uptown” in Oakland, farther north and west of the present site, until the 1870s, when most occupants were forced to vacate.
Fossil rocks dinosaur tree. Herbivorous crocodile? Maybe. Whatever else it ate, it may have consumed a whole school of thought about where and how dinosaurs evolved, say Berkeley integrative biology Ph.D. student Randall Irmis and co-researchers of their find in Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park.
Pulling all-nighters, buying pizza, dressing up as Darwin… As a GSI for Finance (BA 103) and Managerial Accounting (BA 102B), William "Willy" Wong, MBA '05, would offer "numerous review sessions and have 12-hour-long office-hour visits," wrote one of the 37 student who nominated him for heroic status. Another singled out the "large packets of material [he prepared] to help us learn the subject matter, which must have taken him many hours each time" — packets that "if compiled fully, will rival the class textbooks," said another admirer. When one student was having trouble obtaining internships, Wong gave him advice, then offered to look over his résumé, as he did for several others. And his 24/7 help was nondiscriminating: roughly half of the 37 survey respondents admitted that they were not even enrolled in one of his sections.
Being There: Three decades of Nemea through the eyes of its grad students Jorge Bravo (at Nemea in 1997, 1998, 2000, 2001, 2002, and 2003) is a doctoral student whose dissertation is on the Hero Shrine of Opheltes.
Long Journey’s Sweet Ending Charles Man Fong Tung was nervous and tired last December when he walked into the Graduate Degrees Office on the third floor of Sproul Hall to – at long last – file his dissertation. He had made the required two copies, printed in the required font size on the specified archival paper, but was it perfect? What if it wasn’t? Would his years of labor be frustrated? His worries were not uncommon among degree candidates submitting the fruits of their intellectual labor. But, like most, he did it right (even a few days before the deadline), and he could relax.
Portraits & Observations: Emily Prince documents the cost of war In her San Francisco studio, artist Emily Prince quietly continues a work-in-progress, her vast memorial to U.S. troops whose lives were lost in Operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom. The artwork she’s created, completely by hand, consists of thousands of individual, wallet-size portraits, finely drawn in graphite, that, when arranged on a wall, create a very large map of America.
Gritty Journey to Kashmir Leads to Sundance Honor When Shilpi Gupta didn’t receive an honorable mention at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival awards ceremony, she was disappointed.
Trading Spaces: land with a view Wendy Cheng makes comparisons of urban space in Taipei, Tokyo. Levittown, San Diego, and the Carmel Valley, using her camera to document them, winning the Dorothea Lange Fellowship along the way.
Investing in Science Futures: the ARCS Foundation When the Russians sent Sputnik I, the world’s first artificial satellite, into space on October 4, 1957, they unknowingly launched a women’s movement in America which would bring good fortune to higher education — Berkeley in particular — for years to come.
Making History: Ida Louise Jackson This article appeared in the print version of the The Graduate in the Spring of 2001. Editor’s Note: The first Black sorority…