Thoughts on Uncharted Festival, Day 1

One of the main perks of working for the Daily Cal is attending mind-blowing events, such as the ~$300-per-ticket Uncharted Festival of Ideas, for free. A quick description of Uncharted, courtesy of their website: 

OCTOBER 24-25 2014: "Uncharted brings you together with some of the world’s great thinkers for two thrilling days of discussion, debate, and workshops designed to engage and inspire. Hosted in downtown Berkeley’s thriving Arts District and highlighted by a hilltop bash in UC’s exclusive University Club, Uncharted promises to be stimulating, surprising, and fun."

Here were some thoughts I had about the talks I listened to on Friday, Oct 24. 




If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere

Dale Dougherty & Quentin Hardy
Dougherty is the CEO and founder of Makers Media, and he spoke about the importance of learning through making and building things instead of staring at textbooks. I thought it was exciting that there was a possibility of bringing mathematical models to life through 3D printers, so that mathematical education could be more hands on and visual instead of conceptual and abstract. Also, new scientific ideas tend to be protected fiercely by their makers, so that many people who truly want to learn about cutting-edge technology are denied access into the labs where most of the research/magic is happening. That's just the way the world works, and it's great that Dougherty's "Maker Faires" are trying to lend these ideas more accessibility.

The colorization of America

Jeff Chang & Adam Mansbach
Adam Mansbach is as funny in real life as his book, "Go the F*ck to Sleep," suggests. He and Jeff Chang, Executive Director for the Institute for Diversity in the Arts at Stanford, are the funniest duo in the lineup and have wonderful chemistry. I thought it was interesting the way Chang and Mansbach discussed racial and social justice through the lens of parenting. As a parent, Mansbach came up with an interesting idea: kids often think of "fairness" in very personal terms, often complaining that "my brother has more toys than me. Not fair!" Mansbach proposes shaping children's innate sense of "fairness" into a wider vision of social justice.

Here comes the sun: the new energy future

Nate Lewis & Annalee Newitz

Nate Lewis, Professor of Chemistry at CalTech, is working to harness the massive amounts of energy we get from the sun, turn that energy into fuel through artificial photosynthesis (imitating plants), and create enough storage to make solar energy practical and sustainable.
While I'm glad to be living in a world where science is so advanced (compared to the horse and buggy days), at the same time, I'm terrified to be living in a world that is in such desperate need of clean and efficient energy. The sense of urgency I got from Lewis made me realize how close the human species might be to the brink of destruction.
I'm grateful to all the scientists and innovators out there who are working so hard to make our world better, when all we have to do is sit back and enjoy the alternative energy that will gradually replace the oil we pump at our gas stations.

All in the mind: stereotypes exposed

Claude Steele & Lance Knobel
Claude Steele, UC Berkeley Executive Vice Chancellor, told the story "Whistling Vivaldi," in which an African-American student at U of Chicago realized that people on the streets stopped viewing him as a scary black man after he started whistling Vivaldi and Beatles' music as he walked down the street. I've definitely experienced "stereotype threats" of my own- I'm always paranoid that people will view me as a bad driver because I'm an Asian female (maybe that's why I'm a bad driver). I also agree with Steele: while stereotyping, categorizing, and simplifying information around us seems to be an innate and necessary human instinct, stereotyping people can have disastrous consequences, particularly when combined with police brutality, in the Treyvon Martin and Ferguson cases.

More thoughts on Uncharted, coming soon!

Why I have two "useless" majors

Now that I'm halfway through college, I become increasingly nervous when others ask me, "What are you going to do after you graduate?" College students love to ask each other this question, just to contribute to the overall atmosphere of sheer panic. 

Most humanities majors suffer judgement to some degree from naysayers who look pointedly at us and ask "What do you plan to do with that major?" I'm always psyched to be a double humanities major, so I can suffer double the judgement. But I am not here to answer the question of how my degrees will help me in the "real world," because I am still cooped up in my Berkeley bubble, degree-less and jobless. 

I'm only telling the story of how I ended up on my current path. In doing so, I want to demonstrate that everyone's choices are determined by personal influences in their own lives. Before you judge someone else's decisions in life, I hope you remember that most people make their choices with good reason, and you would do well to listen to their stories first. 

Why I'm majoring in Comparative Literature

 I've enjoyed literature since I was a child, always writing stories in little notebooks and devouring chapter books. Up through eighth grade, I was considered one of the better writers in my classes. Of course, I'm now surrounded by amazing writers who make me feel that I have the analytical skills of an eighth grader.

I came to college intending to major in English. My first semester, I took an English class in Middle English, the first of many required courses. It was fun- we read Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Milton's Paradise Lost. I never thought about switching majors until the second time I showed up in my professor's office hours when he asked me casually, "So, who are you?" 

"Who are you?" I asked myself over the next few days. I suddenly realized how large and impersonal the English department was, despite being one of the top English programs in the nation.  So I visited Dwinelle Hall to check out the requirements for Comparative Literature. Oddly enough, I didn't even think about Psychology or Cognitive Science or any of the other majors that might have been more interesting to me. I was still focused on studying literature. 

I switched to Comparative Literature since I had the freedom to take foreign-language literature for my major requirements, allowing me to dabble in Chinese texts. I also considered taking French literature, but after one semester of time-consuming French 1 classes where I told my professor I had a Van Gogh table (tableaux), I gave up that notion. 

I declared my Comp Lit major a few weeks ago. I'm still taking English courses, but don't have to call myself an English major like the billion other people in my department. I'm still surrounded by intelligent people who are much more insightful than I will ever be, but I hope my classes and peers will help me become a better reader and writer. 

Why I'm majoring in Music

I've always had the strange habit of allowing music to take over my life. I've dabbled in many instruments, and I'm proud to say I have rusty and amatuerish skills on the French horn, flute, saxophone, and erhu. 

Berkeley isn't known for having a particularly stellar music program,  so i didn't expect to be heavily involved in music. I only intended to join the orchestra and play percussion with my awesome friend Andy. Almost immediately, the orchestra began to demand more and more of my time. I didn't think much of it,  because I appreciated the solid community that the orchestra provided. Everyone was so passionate about music. An aspiring conductor told me that most graduate music programs required a music degree, which is the reason why he pursued one even after earning his biology degree at Berkeley.

It was difficult to avoid the idea of becoming a music major, with many orchestra students double majoring in Music and other subjects. My conductor casually mentioned that if I became a music major, I would be able to take subsidized (free for me!) private lessons through the Music Department. 

My very first semester as an orchestra percussionist, Cal Performances provided me and other members of the orchestra a free trip to LA and NY, where we would perform in Walt Disney Hall and Avery Fisher Hall with the London Philharmonic. It was an amazing opportunity that came out of nowhere. 

During a bus ride on this tour, I suddenly thought to myself, "How awesome is this? Traveling the nation and expensive cities for free, just to play music? This could be my life." 

I returned to Berkeley with a new resolve. I declared my music major and started taking the annoying music theory lessons. Of course, there have been no free trips since, but music has still brought me amazing new experiences: playing gigs at a pizza place, performing in Mozart's church, and banging on pitched flower pots, just to name a few. 

Why I'm not majoring in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math)

As much as I love science, I can't deny the power of my inspirational high school English teachers who kept my fascination with literature alive and well. Ideally we could have more interdisciplinary fields that combined the arts with technology and science, but then again we wouldn't have the in-depth focus necessary to succeed in a particular field. 

That being said, I think our generation should take mandatory computer science classes in high school, as our culture is so steeped in the computer world. Ironically, I have zero patience with malfunctioning computers, since I operate in shades of gray, while computer logic is often all or nothing, right or wrong.

As I'm a good little hypocrite, I still judge people with even more obscure majors (according to LinkedIn, Governor Brown got a degree at Berkeley in Classics before going on to Yale Law School). But if you know what you love and want to study, others' judgement should be irrelevant. Hopefully this post will inspire everyone to forge their own path. And hopefully I won't be blogging later on about living in a cardboard box. (Just kidding)