Remarks - Department of History, UC Berkeley

i. Susan Clough arrived as a first-year student at age 40, already a
mother. She writes, “I am so grateful to live in a time and place in
history where a woman like me can have a second chance to
achieve a first-tier education.”
ii. René Galvan says that three years ago, he was working as a
custodian in an elementary school, now he’s a Berkeley graduate.
But the thing he’s most proud of is his two-year old son, and he
says, “Justin, Daddy loves you.”
d. Now, the majority of you are what we call “traditional students”—young
people ready to take the world by the horns. But that doesn’t make you
ordinary, you are extraordinary
i. To give you a flavor of how very non-traditional our traditional
students are, here’s what Alice Chernikoff says about her years at
Berkeley: “I struck a balance between hands-on social activism
and esoteric academic passions…This past semester, I spent most
of my afternoons in the BX section of mainstacks reading the
theological and monastic writings of Theodore, a ninth century
Byzantine abbot in what is now Istanbul, for my thesis. At night, I
hopped across the bay to facilitate writing seminars at San
Francisco Juvenile Hall, reaching out to students who have fallen
through the gaps in our education system. I treasure both
experiences as valuable branches of who I am: a passionate
educator and a history hipster.”
e. You are also a remarkably international community.
i. You speak the following languages at home: Armenian, Chinese,
Dari, Farsi, French, German, Hebrew, Hindi, Japanese, Korean,
Polish, Punjabi, Serbian, Spanish, Taiwanese, Tagalog, Telugu,
and Vietnamese.
ii. You and your families come from all over the planet, and it is a
great gift to the state of California that you chose to come here!
f. About 20 of you are graduate students who have just completed the
highest degree in academia, the PhD, and to you I would like to offer both
thanks and congratulations:
i. Thanks, because of all the hard work you’ve put into teaching the
undergraduates in this room: one of our Phds, Zachary Ramirez,
says that, “The most wonderful experience I have had here is when
a student tells me that he or she wants to take more history classes
at UC-Berkeley.”
ii. Congratulations, because we, the faculty, remember just how hard
completing a PhD really is:
1. One of you reports that you spent a week sleeping in your
car while conducting your research.
2. One of you recalls the shock when in your first week in the
program you were assigned 2,000 pages of reading.
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