By Michael Dominguez
At UC Santa Barbara, we students are surrounded by academically-seasoned minds within an elite research institution. College doesn’t hand you a career, you must build a career with your own hands, and your own mind. Universities hand you the tools to learn from your passions. But, how can we use these learning tool-kits to transform our own passions into a life-long goal? My answer: Curiosity.
Maya Zhobi is an Art Major at UC Santa Barbara (UCSB) in its College of Creative Studies. Hear her talk about her work, inspirations, and aspirations outside of school in the following Student Spotlight video.
Aline Ferreira, an assistant professor in the department of Spanish and Portuguese, is currently directing high-tech eye tracking equipment in UCSB’s Bilingualism, Translation, and Cognition Laboratory to observe the brain as it translates from a speaker or typist’s mother tongue to a second language and back again.
She discussed this and other projects in a recent interview with HFA student Sierrah DeBoer.
Writing Program lecturer Patricia Fancher’s research on 20th Century women physicians aligns with her focus on feminist rhetoric, women's writing and writing in the sciences. She was a first generation college student and attributes much of her own success to the community of women who supported her and mentored her through her educational journey.
“It feels like a beautiful tribute to continue to study how other communities of women mentor and support each other,” Fancher said.
At a time when Hip Hop and Electronic Dance Music dominate the music industry, it can be hard for those playing classical and acoustic instruments to get the recognition they deserve. That hasn’t stopped UC Santa Barbara student Zac Erstad, a composer who hopes to fulfill his dream in the music industry by becoming a song producer for either films or video games.
Erstad played with the UCSB Percussion Ensemble in February in performance for mallet instruments called “Old and New,” transcriptions and compositions for mallet instruments. He will also take part in the College of Creative Studies’ musical at the end of the quarter when he will perform three songs that he wrote, along with the show’s overture.
Elizabeth Pérez, assistant professor in Religious Studies at UC Santa Barbara, has won a top
honor for her first book, Religion in the Kitchen: Cooking, Talking, and the Making of Black
Atlantic Traditions. Pérez was awarded the Clifford Geertz Prize in the anthropology of religion
at the 2017 American Anthropological Association meeting in Washington, D.C.
"When I was a PhD student and waiting to talk to people about larger-scale rituals, I was put to
work in the kitchen: slicing vegetables, frying plantains for Platanos Fritos, or rolling little
dumplings or balls of different kinds of flour. I found that it wasn't just the glamorous rituals with the splendid altars and the exciting music that were important, but that what I was doing had a place in the tradition, especially in the formation of religious subjects."
For many undergraduate students nearing the end of their fourth year, graduating college and entering the real world feels daunting and uncertain. For others, the future after college is clear. UC Santa Barbara alumna Julia Marsh is one of those grads who was ready to forge her way to professional success after building the necessary skills while completing her undergraduate degree. Today, she is a successful graphic designer and graduate student in New York, preparing for a future in a field she loves.
Marsh is a 24-year-old from Carmel, a small town on the coast of Northern California. Her college journey started in 2011. While she loved art, she thought it was too impractical a field to pursue as a career so she chose to study writing. In her freshman year, Marsh decided to apply for a job at The Daily Nexus, the student run newspaper on campus. She became fast friends with the design director at the paper, who convinced her to take an available position working in layout. Within a few short months, she took over the role of design director.
Filmmaker Lisa Russell, a UC Santa Barbara alum, travels across the globe to inspire to create a global network of artists for social good.
“The challenge and priority for me now is that I really want to teach. I want to inspire and train responsible storytellers,” Russell said in a recent interview.
About a week before the fall quarter started, I needed to print a document for my home university. As an international exchange student from Japan, it was hard to take in the enormous resources at UCSB. And I was relieved to get to the right building finally, after almost getting lost.
But the building was locked unexpectedly, so I stayed there for about 10 minutes before a man yelled at me to be come back once school started, and then slammed the door in my face. I felt lonely and intimidated, because I was new in the United States and was trying to find my way.
Pulitzer prize winning journalist Dexter Filkins spoke recently at Corwin Pavilion about the modern refugee crisis and why he calls it “the great apocalypse of our time.” The talk was sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center’s Crossings + Boundaries series.
The New Yorker staff writer drew attention to the dire situations of 200 million migrants, coming mainly from South Sudan, Syria, and Afghanistan, who are living in refugee camps for an average stay of 10 years or internally displaced within their home countries.
Q+A: UCSB STUDENT DISCUSSES HER JOURNEY AS AN ASPIRING FILMMAKER
Aryana Moreno, who is set to graduate from the Film and Media Studies department at UC Santa Barbara this spring, did the camera work and editing on The Tipping Point, a short documentary that recently premiered at the 2018 Santa Barbara International Film Festival. A large audience embraced the film at its screening, inspiring Moreno to gain even more hands-on experience in shooting and editing.
UCSB writing lecturer Robert Krut has some advice for soon-to-be teachers: “Remember what it’s like to be a student. Remember what it’s like to sit in a classroom.”
One would imagine that after investing thousands of dollars in tuition, students would be scribbling attentively in their notepads each piece of information that spills from the mouth of their respective professors.
But, this is often not the case.
Robert Brian Huerta places himself in a long line of artists who are considered rebels in their own generation as they explore new directions in their work.
At his recent Glassbox exhibition, UC Santa Barbara’s student-run exhibition space, Huerta invited several punk rock groups to perform within the space. He titled the exhibition Tresspassing: punks in the glassbox.
At the event, Huerta encouraged a clash by having conventional art pieces surround a group of people drinking, singing, and dancing to a live, black-clad punk band.
Second year UC Santa Barbara music student, Vincent Gao steps forward on stage and waves his arms, facing the crowd as he sings the Chinese song “Confession Balloon” into a microphone along with his partner Max Wong.
“Everyone, can you please take out your phones,” Gao calls into the audience. Suddenly one by one, with arms raised and with loud cheers, the audience illuminates the Lotte Lehmann Concert Hall with a sea of bright cell phone lights, in a waving motion.
This was the first round of the Super Nova 2017 Finale in late fall, hosted by the Chinese Student and Scholar Association for Chinese international students. Excitement filled the venue as 300 Chinese international students filled the seats of the concert hall that evening in to enjoy music far away from home.
