Loving the Campus

I want to love this campus as God loves it, and in order to do that, I need to get to know it better! Here are some of the things I'm discovering about Cal:

 

source: oep.berkeley.edu



According to the UC Berkeley website,

"The University of California was chartered in 1868 and its flagship campus — envisioned as a 'City of Learning' — was established at Berkeley, on San Francisco Bay. Today the world's premier public university and a wellspring of innovation, UC Berkeley occupies a 1,232 acre campus with a sylvan 178-acre central core. From this home its academic community makes key contributions to the economic and social well-being of the Bay Area, California, and the nation."

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Student body

Number of students: 36,142 students as of Fall 2011 including 25,885 undergraduates and 10,257 pursuing graduate degrees. (Source)
Undergraduate gender: 53% female and 47% male (Fall 2011).
Degrees granted in 2010-11: Bachelor's, 7,466; Master's and professional degrees, 2,480; Doctoral, 905

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Profile of admitted freshmen

Number of applicants: 50,312 (Fall 2010) (Source)
4,109 students enrolled (Fall 2010) (Source)
25.6% of applicants admitted (Fall 2010 and Spring 2011) (Source)
4.19 (on a 4.0 scale) median high-school grade point for admitted freshmen (Fall 2010). (Source)
SAT scores: Average SAT Composite score of 2031 for admitted freshmen (Fall 2010).
73% from California (Fall 2010) (Source)
63% from California public high schools (2010) (Source)
25.1% are first generation college student with neither parent having a four-year college degree (Fall 2010) (Source)
66% have at least one parent born outside the U.S. (2009) (Source)

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Fields of study

Motto: Fiat Lux  ("Let there be light")

130 academic departments and more than 80 interdisciplinary research units.
Colleges and schools: UC Berkeley is divided into 14 colleges and schools, most of which are subdivided into departments.
Most popular majors (as of Fall 2009): Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1500 students; Political Science, 916 students; Molecular and Cell Biology, 1020 students; Environmental Science, Policy and Management, 886 students; Economics 828 students. (Source)
Courses offered: More than 7,000 courses in some 350 degree programs; the campus produces more Ph.D.s annually than any other U.S. university. (Cal Facts 2009)




As interesting as all this data is, it is also not necessarily the experience of the people who live, study, and work here. Checking out the Golden Bears blog, I compiled the one-word descriptions these Cal bloggers use to describe their school:

Vibrant

                                                                                                   Exploratorium
                                                           Golden!
                                                                                 Super-CAL-ifragilisticexpialidocious
                                                 Balanced
                                                                                                                        Community
                                                                                  Opportunity-filled
                                                                Unique
                                                                                             Microcosm


I'm interested to hear how the students in Cal Christian Fellowship (the InterVarsity chapter I'll be working with) describe their experiences at Berkeley.

Why?

I've been getting this question a lot lately. Seems that inquiring minds want to know ...

Estelle, why are you going to Berkeley?

Why you?
                Why Cal?
                                Why now?

I'm sure I'll be asking myself these questions in a few weeks when I'm finally there and it fully dawns on me that I'm not on the Farm anymore. Before I attempt to give an answer, I have to start with the truth that I don't totally know why and probably won't until way later. So this is a first draft, to be revised as I live more years and figure out a few other things.

False reasons that you might be tempted to believe:
       I'm going because I've always wanted to live in Berkeley.
       I'm going because I don't like Stanford, Palo Alto, or the people there enough to stay.
       I'm going because I look better in blue and yellow and I am betraying my alma mater.

The real reason I'm going is that God said, "Come, follow me at Berkeley" in March 2013 when I was discerning what my next three years on staff would be. I knew that I wanted to be in InterVarsity for the next phase of my life while God continued to speak into my future. I had assumed that Stanford would be the place I would continue on staff. God opened a process of dialogue with supervisors about potentially relocating to a different campus--specifically Cal--and from the beginning, the possibility had an eerie sense of "rightness" about it. I visited Berkeley and found it to be my ideal Sabbath spot--a place I would go to unwind, connect with God, and enjoy activities and settings that give me joy (museums! libraries! parks!). It scared me more than a little because it felt like it actually fit. That's another way I could tell this was probably God's doing.

As a final push, God presented me with a challenge at the Asian American Ministries Staff Conference in Long Beach, CA. It was the challenge not to keep sitting at the kids' table--an exhortation to develop and use the gifts God has given me, even when those gifts feel like they require courage to accept and to act on (like the gift of prophecy, which is about speaking God's words and shedding light on a murky situation). God was clear that he wanted to start a new chapter in my life using gifts I hadn't fully seen in myself, and he invited me to trust him by stepping out of the comfortable space I'd been in for the past 7 years (aka the "nest") and trying my wings in an unfamiliar setting.

I'm taking with me the lessons God has taught me as well as the relationships that have seen me through these growing years, but I still feel exposed and self-conscious as I anticipate my new context. I'm pretty sure that's exactly where God wants me to be. It was easy enough to love others when I was inviting them into my world--into my school that I'm familiar with, and into my fellowship, where I know what my role is. How much more difficult (and more amazing) will it be to learn to love others when I myself don't quite know how I fit or where I belong?

It's an exciting challenge, and one that I hope you'll be blessed by as you read my blog, LovingCal, over the next three years.