For 28 days starting on Jan. 16, UC Irvine student ears have picked up on spontaneous tunes and beats from the keys of a mysterious piano played by talented musicians. In front of Irvine Barclay Theater, students may have heard the fingers of ICS major Norman Tran jamming to jazz music, ESL exchange student from Japan Shintaro Hirai performing classical music or biomedical engineer Joseph Chris Gomez moving to the rhythm of R&B and soul. They all play for the joy of music.
Ever dream of flying? I know I have. I love the feeling of being above ground, letting my feet dangle in the air or riding on an airplane, gazing down at the cities below me.
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.
