Features

This past summer, grief seemed to swallow me up whole. Between the stress of planning for a new year at school and trying to figure out my future plans, the unspeakable happened: my uncle David passed away after a six-month battle with brain cancer.

Every week, a group of undergraduate students cluster around Timothy Wong, a comparative literature graduate student studying at UC Irvine. They go over a lesson plan and make sure they are ready to carry it out and teach low-income juniors at Orange High School.

News sources reporting on the likely budget cuts to enrollment and certain departments on each campus have maintained the current uncertainty of the effects. But these cuts have already taken a toll on UC Irvine’s quality education in unseen ways.

The implications of the UC-wide budget cut affect all of us. The effects are seen in the consistently rising tuition rates and the notorious underfunding of various departments throughout different schools. What we don’t always see, though, is what goes on behind the scenes: for teaching assistants on campus, the uncertainties they face are less positions open, less resources available for research, and less opportunities to finish out their Ph.D.s.

Around UCI by the New University photographers.

A moment from UCI Athletics.

School of Biological Sciences By Annie Kim The School of Biological Sciences has undoubtedly some of the most impacted majors here. The budget cuts...

A moment from UCI Athletics.

The New University staff photographers' coverage of the Martin Luther King, Jr. symposium and more!

Twenty years ago, I entered this world with no idea of what I wanted to be when I grew up. Sometime after that, I wanted to become a Pokemon master. At age 11, I was waiting for my letter from Hogwarts so I could grow up to be a wizard. Today, I’m working toward a career in journalism. And for some reason, out of all those career dreams, my mother objected to my career as a journalist the most.

It’s 5 o’clock in the morning when my alarm rings. It is time to go to work. After listening to a few seconds of Coldplay’s “Yellow,” I turn off my alarm and open my eyes. The room is dark. The night-light from the hallway creeps under the shut door and provides the only visible light in my room.

It felt as though the world had completely lost its mind — the zodiac calendar changed and whatever your original sign was probably fell victim to this awful tilt of the Earth’s axis. Gone were the standard 12 zodiac constellations and, with it, our sanity.