This semester, Robert Paylor, a junior at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, is up by 5:30 a.m., hits the gym, then attends an accounting class and a political lecture, works out again for two hours, bolts down Chex Mix and an energy drink, and heads to another class.

Most Cal student-athletes have a similar routine. But for Paylor, a former varsity Cal rugby player recovering from partial paralysis, just getting out of bed and dressed in the morning is a feat, never mind the daily grind of navigating the hilly campus in a wheelchair and an intense rehabilitation schedule.

That Paylor is even alive and starting to walk with assistance after a devastating accident 16 months ago is a miracle. Fans cheered him on Saturday at California Memorial Stadium when he was introduced and walked during the first quarter of the football game.

“The guy is a bloody inspiration,” says Jack Clark, head rugby coach at Berkeley and former head coach of the U.S. national rugby team. “He has a lot of faith, and support from his family, but this is a kid who wakes up and answers the bell every day. It’s a form of perseverance that you don’t understand until you see it. You have to see it to understand the depths of it.”

On May 6, 2017, Paylor, a freshman at the time, was injured at the Varsity Cup championship match between Cal and Arkansas State. That moment, caught on video — an opponent wrapped his arm around Paylor’s neck and didn’t let go as a formation of players called a maul collapsed — still raises questions. Paylor’s parents condemned the sport’s governing body, USA Rugby, for not disciplining the opponent; Clark called the hit preventable and “illegal” under the laws of the game.

In the aftermath, doctors told Paylor he’d suffered a spinal cord injury and likely would never walk again. Paylor then caught pneumonia, which lingered a month. He couldn’t eat or sit up for more than 10 minutes without passing out, and the muscles on his 6-foot 5-inch, 235-pound frame quickly atrophied.

“I was broken physically and mentally when I first got hurt,” says Paylor. “I couldn’t feel anything from my neck down. My prognosis was terrible. They said, ‘You’ll be happy if you can ever pick up a piece of pizza again and bring it to your face.’”

Paylor never accepted that; he believed that, with hard work and faith, he would walk one day without assistance. That belief in himself, that grit that coaches say defines Paylor, is why he’s at the cavernous Simpson Center for Student-Athlete High Performance, where he works out three times a week with Tom Billups, the associate head coach of Cal Rugby.

When asked if he expects Paylor to ever walk without his walker, Billups simply nods.

Paylor moves laboriously through his walking workouts, powering through 50-yard laps with the help of braces and a walker. Billups, a strength and conditioning specialist, is always right behind him, with an encouraging word or, when required, a verbal push.

Paylor’s current personal record is 350 yards, but sometimes, like on a recent day after an intense and fatiguing neuro-Pilates workout, it’s more like 300.

Billups understands Paylor’s frustration with incremental improvements. Before the accident, Paylor’s role as a rugby lock was all about using his height and muscle to provide power inside the scrum. “Coaching him before the injury, I know that he’s a grinder,” Billups says. “His position was to do all of the hard stuff — tackling, pushing guys and moving people who don’t want to be moved,”

Now, Paylor applies that same effort to moving his own legs, which with every step can feel like lifting 40-pound weights.

At Berkeley Haas, Paylor is surrounded by the tight-knit Cal rugby community. Coordinating through a Google doc schedule organized by Clark, the entire team has signed up to follow their friend from class to class, with occasional challenges when his wheelchair’s fickle smart battery gives out.

“Geographically, these hills are brutal,” says Paylor, who has memorized the locations of all of the automatic doors on campus and the areas of classrooms where it’s easiest to pull up to a desk. “Accessible seating is probably the biggest thing.”

The help from classmates extends to weekends, too. “Robert is their friend, and they want to include him in whatever they’re doing,” Clark says. “If they’re going to the Cal football game or the women’s soccer game, it’s, ‘Hey, do you want to go?’”

The team downplays efforts made on Paylor’s behalf. “It’s good to just have him back,” said Cal rugby flanker Ben Casey, an environmental economics major.

Paylor’s supportive community extends to legions of Cal alumni and rugby teams worldwide, including players from Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom who have sent Paylor letters of encouragement and jerseys. Close to $1 million has been raised for Paylor through his GoFundMe campaign, money to fund many rehabilitation expenses not covered by insurance.

A few hundred thousand in donations poured in within days of Paylor’s injury as word got out, says Cal Rugby player and Berkeley Haas junior Tyler Douglas, Paylor’s closest friend and former weightlifting partner.

“Everyone understands what the Cal community is,” Douglas said. “You respect the people who came before you, and those people respect and care for you.” Douglas said momentum gathered as word of Paylor’s injury spread. “Then the international rugby community came out, and it kept spreading,” he said. “We’d be at tournaments, and they’d mention his name.”

The response is partly a testament to who Paylor is, he said. “You’ll never meet another person like him,” he says. “He’ll shoot you a big smile and a handshake. I’m close to everyone on the team, but the connection you make with Rob is immediate.”

Paylor said the support motivates him. “It’s just huge that so many people are rooting for me,” he says. “When I’m having dark times and feeling sorry for myself, I have all of these people who believe in me. It’s infectious. It keeps me going.”

For Paylor, getting into Berkeley Haas as a junior was a life goal. His parents, who live in El Dorado Hills, California, both work in business, and he has decided to follow in their footsteps. And rugby, he says, has a lot in common with business. “In rugby, you graduate with a Ph.D. in teams,” he explains.

Over the summer, after he finished intense neurorehabilitation at Craig Hospital in Colorado, Paylor interned in operations at Intel Corp. Now, he’s enjoying the breadth of the subject matter in his classes — from lecturer Suneel Udpa’s accounting course to lecturer Arturo Perez-Reyes’ business communications course, where he’s learning why soft skills are important in business.

While Paylor isn’t sure what he’ll do after graduation, an MBA is part of the plan.

Business is a perfect path for Paylor, Clark says. “A lot of cognitive smarts come out of business schools — but if they want someone with grit and smarts, he’s a combination,” the coach says. “Something tells me that this guy will go on to do something really phenomenal.”

In the process of conquering the world, Alexander the Great came to the town of Gordium. In that town was a piece of rope entangled in an intricate knot. Whoever unraveled the knot, according to legend, would rule the world.

Many had tried, and all had failed. Nor had anyone ever ruled the world. Alexander contemplated the knot and his options. He fiddled with the knot but got nowhere. Then he drew his sword, sliced the knot apart, and went on to rule the world.

This legend is usually told as a justification of a bravura style of leadership. Wannabe leaders try conventional solutions to problems and fail. The natural leader scorns those, thinks outside the envelope, and rightly rules.

In his second hearing, on September 27, Brett Kavanaugh demonstrated Alexandrian leadership style, with considerable success. But just as Alexander’s impetuousness (and drinking habits) led to his early death, it may yet transpire that the bravura style may not work in Judge Kavanaugh’s long-term interests.

You might, as many have noted, see a hearing of this kind as a job interview. You could also see it as an audition, in which a candidate demonstrates his possession of the skills he would need to successfully perform the job for which he is applying. Then the employer has to ask: does this candidate’s behavior demonstrate what I am looking for?

An associate justice of the Supreme Court needs a skill different from that of a world conqueror, the ability to handle something vastly more complex than swords: Words. The position for which Kavanaugh was auditioning requires, first of all, the ability to know what kind of talk is required in that position and to use it appropriately.

What Kavanaugh demonstrated at the hearing was precisely the opposite.

The Supreme Court is a collaborative body. Success as a justice — getting your opinions to be part of our laws — requires the ability to “get to five” — to persuade four of your colleagues to agree with you. Certainly intellectual acumen, the ability to understand the facts, grasp the relevant history, and marshal cogent arguments is vital.

But probably a more important talent is the ability to behave collaboratively, to show respect for one’s colleagues and a willingness to subordinate one’s ego to the ethos of the group. To do so, it is necessary to employ the expected discourse style of the profession in a way that is most likely to make the organization run smoothly. Blustering, bullying, mockery, and repeated untruthfulness are likely to achieve just the opposite.

The late Antonin Scalia may exemplify the dangers of getting it wrong. No one doubts his raw intelligence. But he was given to tantrums when crossed: scathing sarcasm, refusal to compromise, and fits of pouting. As a result, he was most often unsuccessful in persuading his colleagues, and his personal opinions enjoyed little success. In contrast, Sandra Day O’Connor, perhaps less of an intellectual star, was able to act and speak collaboratively, and many considered her the most influential member of the court.

A hyper-macho audition

The genders of my examples are not irrelevant. In the Kavanaugh hearing, Christine Blasey Ford used something close to a typical and traditional feminine discursive style, while the nominee used a form of interaction best characterized as not so much masculine or manly, but hyper-macho — a gross exaggeration of what we think of as masculine. Blasey Ford drew her hearers — even her opponents — to her, while Kavanaugh scared them off. They responded as one responds to a schoolyard bully: by acknowledging their authority, but unhappily.

This is the style of his supporter, the president, who seems to win at times, but the victory is always clouded by the feeling that it is illegitimate. If confirmed, lack of influence will be Kavanaugh’s legacy, and during his tenure his behavior will interfere with the court’s smooth functioning and diminish its prestige. In fact, maybe Kavanaugh has given liberals a reason to take heart: if he is confirmed, his discursive style may drive some of the court’s more conservative members into taking more centrist positions just to maintain their self-respect.

What made Kavanaugh’s audition style a warning of the destructive role he might play on the court if confirmed was basically his hyper-machismo: the implicit white male entitlement he displayed through his petulant refusal to answer questions responsively, based on an implicit belief in his right to the position and his right not to have to answer for his treatment of inferiors (like women); his swings from braggadocio (the highest grades; the superlative athletic achievements; etc.) to self-pity, including even traditionally unmanly tears; his shouting and truculence; his inability to provide a coherent narrative, substituting threats, contempt for his questioners, and repetitions (and repetitions….) of his tale of his own wonderfulness; his overwrought facial expressions and expansive gestures (he’s larger than life); and his refusal or inability to abide by the discursive rules that have always governed hearings like these, in particular, any recognition of the options open to the various participants in this kind of talk.

From early childhood, humans learn to recognize and participate meaningfully in a range of discursive options with different rules, roles, and properties. From interactions with peers, we learn to navigate ordinary conversation: it is egalitarian and reciprocal: all participants have access to the same kinds of language (questions, demands, statements) and can expect to be understood in similar ways.

In our families it’s somewhat different: adults and older siblings have rights little ones do not: adults can demand the floor, they can ask questions that children can’t, they can be bossy. In school, children learn still more about non-reciprocity: the teacher can speak in one set of ways, the students in another. Children also learn, very early, that talk is gendered: girls and boys speak differently and are understood differently. So by young adulthood, we move competently among different discourse worlds, and by achieving these different forms of competence, we become flexible participants, able to learn and use the strategies of whatever occupation we find ourselves in. Ideally, that is, we do, but some of us do it better than others.

Those of us who have had to learn from early on that we are not equal — little girls, for instance — must become more flexible and adaptive, more willing to listen to others, and more adept at more kinds of talk. Those who are raised to be hyper-men, on the other hand, learn to close off their options: they’re the boss, they don’t have to adapt. Until very recently, this strategy (if such it can be called) has worked for them.

But once women get to participate more or less fully in public discourse, as at the hearing, there turns out to be another way to talk, another way to listen, and the familiar bullying tactics, if employed, fall flat. This is likely to be the case on the court.

She deferred; he swaggered

Kavanaugh proved unable to adapt his style of discourse to his situation: confronted with a strikingly successful presentation by his opponent, he resorted to adopting a style that was diametrically opposed to hers. She deferred; he swaggered. She spoke softly; he bellowed. She produced a coherent and relevant narrative; he managed only repetition and self-pity combined with self-promotion.

Along with his Republican supporters (Lindsey Graham and Orrin Hatch especially memorably), he pulled out all the hyper-macho stops: affecting a ludicrously combative style in order to demonstrate that only one gender was worthy of being taken seriously. By the time the day was over, both Kavanaugh and the Republican members of the Judiciary Committee had managed to offend, insult, and injure just about every relevant woman: female Democratic members of the Committee; Rachel Mitchell; and of course, Blasey Ford herself. They had turned into latency-age boys who, to preserve their inchoate male identity, have to think of girls as having cooties.

There were the Republicans’ repeated references to the accuser as “Mrs. Ford” — not allowing her to choose her own name, and ignoring her title and status (he was always “Judge Kavanaugh”); their casting aside of their “female assistant,” Rachel Mitchell, when she no longer served their purposes; the continual ranting against Dianne Feinstein for her perfectly reasonable decision to protect Blasey Ford’s privacy; and Kavanaugh’s reprehensible treatment of both Amy Klobuchar and Sheldon Whitehead.

By turning Klobuchar and Whitehead into the job-seekers (the subordinate position), Kavanaugh managed to turn the discourse rules of hearings (or job interviews) on their head, the better to demonstrate that the macho man makes his own rules and forces his interlocutors to adhere to them, thereby cutting the Gordian knot.

Normal hearings discursively resemble courtroom cross-examinations (with which Kavanaugh must be familiar), in one important respect. Unlike informal conversation, hearing discourse is not reciprocal: one party asks questions, the other answers. That distinction arises out of the purpose of hearings, and underscores the power relationship between interrogator and responder: the former is, and must be, more powerful than the latter; the latter needs the good will of the former more than the reverse.

By turning the tables on two of his questioners, Kavanaugh demonstrated both contempt for established precedent and disdain for the people he mistreated: they became weaklings and incompetents, left uncertain what to do in a circumstance that had never happened to them before. That must have been especially pleasing to Trump and his supporters.

A bad boy of advanced age

Such violative behavior makes it probable that Kavanaugh will never follow normal expectations. That choice works circularly: his sense of privilege means he is above the rules, and his refusal to play by those rules signifies to others that he is indeed privileged. In his youth (as his calendar entries show) he gloried in his role of “bad boy.” Perhaps boys will be boys, but once they have grown up to be eligible for high-level positions, they cannot be boys any longer. But by his behavior at his hearing, Brett Kavanaugh showed that his favorite self-image was still, even at his advanced age, that of a “bad boy.”

So the argument that the event that Blasey Ford eloquently retold happened 36 years ago and so is no longer consequential, was proven false by Kavanaugh’s responses to Whitehouse and Klobuchar. In his mind, he is immune to the rules of normal behavior. The fact that he still makes this assumption tends to prove the truth of Blasey Ford’s claims. The fact that he still makes this assumption and acts accordingly means that, once appointed to the court, he will be as dangerous in that important role as his biggest fan is in his important role, for similar reasons. Social animals function best when there are expectations that they know will guide everyone’s behavior.

The testimony keeps being described as “he said/she said.” But it isn’t. It’s closer to “She said/he expostulated, bellowed, ranted, sniveled, grimaced, and whined.” Hers was normal. His was something else. Surely he knew this; why did he persist?

I suspect that his hyper-machismo and hyper-emotionality were a means of calling all of us off the scent. Rather than listening to his (nonexistent) narrative, we were continually tempted to fall into the bathetic universe he was constructing. Moreover, he may have seen his task as looking as if he were telling the truth. Since he had no way of being truthful and getting the job, he had to construct a persona that listeners saw as truthful. But alas! Many of us were not fooled. On the other hand, quite a few of us wanted to be, and fell into the web.

Just as Kavanaugh’s audition offered observers a foretaste of his likely performance in the job he sought, so it fits neatly into an understanding of how his past, his present, and his future are of a piece. What he was in 1982 is what he is in 2018 and will be, if confirmed, in 2054. It’s all about dominance over women. In 1982 sexual assault was his weapon of choice, all he had available to him; today, he has words to use to harass Amy Klobuchar and the other women he embarrassed. Tomorrow, he will twist the law to empower men like him at women’s expense. The equation is simple:

Rape = Sexual and gender harassment = Denial of women’s control of their minds and bodies.

The =’s are not intended to mean that each of these is equally horrific for victims, but that all share what John Searle called the illocutionary point: what a speaker intends to convey by her speech act. All three are about the domination of women by privileged men: I can do what I want to you, because I am he and you are she.

The rules of discourse function as a kind of Gordian knot, complex but essential, enabling humans to function as social creatures. It is possible to make yourself a ruler by cutting that knot apart. But you cannot function as a competent leader in the role Brett Kavanaugh is seeking to play if that’s your modus operandi. You cannot be an associate justice of the Supreme Court and behave lawlessly. Or, if it turns out that you can, we are surely living in perilous times.

Robin Lakoff studies language and gender, the politics of language, and language and popular culture. More academically, her work comes under the rubrics of sociolinguistics and the relationship between language form and language function. She has written or edited 10 books, among them Language and Woman’s Place, Face Value: The Politics of Beauty, Talking Power, and The Language War. She also blogs for The Huffington Post.

First-year Berkeley Law student Teresa Scanlan never set out to be Miss America. It was just something that kind of happened.

From a family of six kids in rural Nebraska — all of whom were homeschooled — Teresa didn’t think about how she looked or what she wore. It wasn’t important. She cared about learning new things, playing piano and discussing politics with her family. She wanted to be a lawyer — somebody whose words people remembered.

“I was never the girl who wanted to be a princess when I grew up,” she says. “I never had any other plans except that I wanted to be an attorney, a judge, a Supreme Court Justice. In that order. That was my career plan all the way through.”

But Teresa knew she had to find a way to pay for college. So when she saw an ad in the local newspaper for a county fair pageant that gave the winner a $200 scholarship, she decided to go for it. And at 13 — wearing braces, a wide smile and a $12 dress from the after-prom sale at JC Penney’s — Teresa won her first pageant.

From then on, she started to enter more local pageants. She won some and lost some, but she always took home first place for her performance on the piano — a skill she was really proud of.

As a junior, she went to public high school and graduated early with honors. Her plans were in place — she would go to a university in Virginia, then to law school. She’d compete in pageants when she could to bring in more scholarship money, but it wouldn’t be a big deal — just something that she would do when she had time.

But at 17, she won Miss Nebraska and everything changed. She had one shot at competing in the Miss America Pageant.

“It’s truly once in a lifetime,” she says, “so I was kinda like, ‘Well, this is it.’”

Winning, as it turned out, wasn’t the hard part

For Teresa, actually competing in the Miss America contest in 2011 wasn’t the hard part. She went into the competition feeling good about who she was — she was 17, and hadn’t really experienced bullying or how mean people could be on social media.

“I went into it pretty naive,” she says. “I really wanted to prove myself and come across as mature and thoughtful and strong, and be able to hold my own with women who were much older than me,” she says. “I just wanted to make Nebraska proud.”

She didn’t think she had a chance at winning. After all, she was the youngest contestant — she made the age cut off by a week — and Nebraska had never won the title. It’s something everyone told her couldn’t happen.

But then she made the top 10. Then the top five.

“So I was standing there with my first runner-up and I just knew it was going to be her,” says Scanlan. “I was thinking, ‘She’s great. She’s 24 and awesome. Nebraska has never been a runner-up before and I’m going to go home and everyone will be so proud of me.’”

Then, they called her name. Teresa couldn’t believe it. And you can see it in the photos of her from the time — the look on her face is genuine disbelief. She was the youngest person to win the crown since Bette Cooper in 1937.

But the high didn’t last long.

The next day, she was flown to New York to do a weeklong media tour and from there, every day of her year — except three weeks of vacation — were planned out for her. She gave speeches to businesses, brought visibility to nonprofits, visited wounded veterans, sang the “Star Spangled Banner” at baseball games and gave face time at glitzy events like the Kentucky Derby.

It was really hard work, Teresa says.

“You have no home base, no place to live,” she says. “It’s just you and two suitcases and your appearance manager. Everything is 100 percent controlled — what you wear, what you do. Every moment of every day. You’re writing your speeches, you’re doing your hair and makeup. I think it’s a lot more demanding than people realize. Your life is not your own.”

But that part didn’t actually bother her — she knew that’s what she was signing up for. And she thinks, because she was so young, she was kind of used to people telling her what to do.

It was when she saw the comments about her online that made her question everything she knew about herself.

All of a sudden, it was open season on her

Each time Scanlan would see comments about her online, she felt a piece of herself chip away. It wasn’t the comments criticizing her looks or body that got to her; it was when people attacked her intelligence. She knew she was smart, curious and hard working, but suddenly, no one else did.

“I remember watching a YouTube video of my piano piece and then just scrolling through the comments and starting to be like, ‘Wait, what?’ Just seeing thousands of comments ripping me apart for absolutely everything. There was always something about my blond hair. Always.”

Back home, people from her conservative Christian community said that wearing a bikini onstage was pornographic and that she wasn’t a true Christian. Others said she was demeaning herself and giving women a bad name.

“It became this overwhelming sense of, ‘You’re not pleasing anyone and you’re never enough for anyone. So what I considered a very strong sense of self quickly became an addiction to people pleasing — to doing what I thought would please the largest number of people.”

It’s a feeling that’s followed her throughout her life and in some ways, is still with her seven years later.

Speaking out

After her Miss America year, Scanlan didn’t slow down. She won a full scholarship to attend college in Virginia, got married, had a son, got divorced and, over the summer, joined the Air National Guard. She started at Berkeley Law this fall. And she’s only 25.

Last month, she made headlines again when she gave an interview on Fox News in support of 2017 Miss America Cara Mund, who was calling for the organization’s board of directors to step down. As Miss America, Mund said she felt that she’d been bullied and silenced — especially by board Chairwoman Gretchen Carlson, who had been appointed to the position in January 2018.

After Mund went public with her criticism, Carlson held a conference call for all the former Miss Americas. Scanlan listened to her, asked questions and was ultimately dissatisfied with Carlson’s responses.

And Scanlan felt that it was her responsibility to join the 21 other former Miss Americas in publicly supporting Mund — something that she would have wanted when she had the title.

“I think Cara was really brave to come out and say what she did,” says Scanlan. “I think Carlson should have offered an apology right away. Instead, she tried to turn it around and say that what Cara was saying wasn’t true. If nothing else, it’s bad PR. I appreciate Gretchen as a person, but if she can’t do the right thing, she should step down.”

Carlson, who has been an active voice in the #MeToo movement, has spent the last year rebranding the Miss America Competition (it’s no longer a pageant) — most notably, by eliminating the bikini contest.

Scanlan says she doesn’t care one way or the other about the bikini competition, but she does want to be clear that she doesn’t think wearing a bikini detracts from a woman’s worth or intelligence.

“I think a very big part of being a feminist means allowing women to make choices for themselves,” she says. “We should be showing that you can do both. I really don’t think we hold men to the same standard. If a man does bodybuilding, we don’t consider that it takes away from anything else — that it makes him less intelligent or successful. I don’t want women to go through what I did.”

Back on track at Berkeley

As a law student at Berkeley, Scanlan is back on track with her life plan. She and her 2-year-old son, Jace, just moved to the Bay Area from her parents’ house in Nebraska and it’s been an adjustment figuring out how to balance schoolwork and life as a single mom. But she’s determined to make it happen.

She isn’t sure what kind of law she wants to practice — maybe corporate law or criminal law when Jace is older. But the next two years are open, she says — she’s going to let herself figure it out as she goes.

Some days are easier than others, she says, but she’s where she’s always wanted to be.

Just south of the California border in Tijuana, a small building is a makeshift home to a small community of men, Mexican citizens who called the United States home but were deported even after serving time in the U.S. military.

It’s formally called the Deported Veterans Support House, but most simply call it the Bunker. Its residents lived legally in the U.S. until they ran afoul of the law and were sent back across the border, their service notwithstanding.

And it’s a place where Alfredo Figueroa, who graduates this week from UC Berkeley and himself is an Army veteran, sees that he can make a difference. He has visited the Bunker twice, and saw himself in the men who live there. Now, as the recipient of the Judith Lee Stronach Prize, he plans to use his $25,000 award to support veterans in exile.

A self-fulfilling prophecy

Figueroa grew up in San Francisco’s Mission district. The oldest of three, his childhood was checkered with trouble, something that constantly worried his parents, who came to the U.S. when civil war rocked El Salvador in the 1980s. Poor and not well served by his school, Figueroa fell in with the wrong crowd. By 17, he had two felonies and three misdemeanors on his record and had been incarcerated twice.

“As a Latino male growing up, I felt like I was very quickly labeled to be a certain way or to be a specific thing. Almost all of the time that was negative,” says Figueroa. “You keep telling this Latino youth that he’s a gangbanger, he’s a good-for-nothing, he’s never going to amount to anything — eventually it felt like a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

His imprisonment took a toll on his parents, who placed him in private school to ensure that he would graduate. Even with a high school diploma in hand, he couldn’t be convinced to consider going to college.

“At the end of the day,” he reflects, “I didn’t see an investment in educating myself at the time because it didn’t speak to me. But I remember my parents asking themselves, ‘What are we going to do with our firstborn? He’s finally not in jail anymore. He’s not doing drugs. He’s not gangbanging anymore. What do we do with him?’”

His mother offered to let him take over a branch of the family check-cashing and wire-transfer business. But Figueroa had other plans: military service.

Enlisting, he thought, would elevate him from his past. It would be a proving ground where he would leave his missteps behind and demonstrate his honor and integrity — not to mention a promise from the Army that his criminal record would be expunged if he served honorably. As an infantryman, Figueroa operated a machine gun and saw action in Iraq and Afghanistan. He joined the Army seeking clarity and purpose, but returned feeling more torn apart than ever.’

“When I think back to my service, I think I was desperate to do something with my life. I wanted to get out of the environment I was in,” he says. “But the military didn’t accomplish everything I wanted it to. I realized that people will still only see me in a positive light as long as I’m doing what they want me to do.”

Back home after three tours, Figueroa struggled with PTSD. Combat had exposed him to new set of traumas he wasn’t yet ready to confront. He continued to resist his parents’ pleas to go to college. Instead, he worked as an auto mechanic, slowly processing his experiences as a soldier while living hand to mouth. A turning point came when he saw the pride that a co-worker felt after his daughter was accepted to UC Santa Cruz.

‘I had to hear it from someone else’

“Don Jose,” remembers Figueroa. “He was an older guy from Mexico and he was so happy when his daughter got into school. He said to me, ‘She’s never going to have to break her back the way I do. She’s going to get more.’”

“It hit home, because that’s my parents’ story,” he says. “I just didn’t listen until I heard it from someone else.”

In Figueroa’s words, the next few years were spent “getting with the program.” Newly dedicated to playing by the rules, he vowed to educate himself so he could be of service to his community. He spent three years at Chabot Community College before transferring into the Haas School of Business at Berkeley. En route, he won the Kruttschnitt Aspire Scholarship, which supports low-income, underrepresented minority students. In 2017, he reflected on what the scholarship — and feeling accepted — meant to him.

Berkeley proved a challenge. For three semesters, Figueroa tried to work full-time and carry a full course load. After failing classes in his third semester, he quit his job to focus on his school work. To support himself, he worked as a peer adviser at the Cal Veterans Services Center.

‘I didn’t believe it at first’

Last year, as part of a DeCal class focused on educating students about immigration policy, Figueroa found himself in Arizona working with communities affected by immigration laws. It was during this Alternative Break that he learned about the community of deported veterans in Tijuana.

“I didn’t believe it at first,” says Figueroa, initially thinking he had sniffed out a con. “A bunch of guys pretending to be veterans to scam people for money,” he says. But he dug in, and research connected him with Hector Barajas, a deported veteran running the Bunker in Tijuana.

“I just felt this need to help,” says Figueroa. “If all of this was true, and Hector was living down there and working with other veterans, I needed to figure out how I could get involved.”

Figueroa visited the Bunker twice, delivering supplies and money that had been donated — mostly from the Cal Veterans on campus. The Bunker is a relatively small space that temporarily houses recently deported veterans. While there, they can draw from a cache of donated items — things like razors, deodorant and toothpaste — and get help filing for their V.A. benefits. It’s also a place of community and camaraderie.

“Hector would provide housing for them for three or four months while they got back on their feet,” explains Figueroa. “I’ve personally met around 30 veterans in my two trips down there.” He says Barajas hears from people who have been deported to different parts and has a database of about 300 names.

The ACLU of California estimates that there are more than 200 deported veterans in more than 30 countries.

Ever since his first visit, Figueroa has been moved to raise awareness of the deportees. Over Presidents Day in February, he and other Cal Vets traveled to Tijuana to deliver supplies and visit with those in the Bunker. Their efforts earned the Cal Veterans group the UC Berkeley Chancellor’s Award for Public Service in civic engagement earlier this month.

“It was an instance where the Cal Veteran community really rallied around the idea of supporting these people,” says Ron Williams, director of re-entry student and veteran services.

‘They sacrificed so much’

Now Figueroa has made supporting this community a top priority.

“We can’t control if someone is going to get into trouble or not,” he says, “but if they do and they pay their debt to society, they still deserve the help they’re entitled to.”

As someone who has felt out of place and devalued by society for much his life and is also a veteran, Figueroa feels the plight of the deported veterans as a deeply personal injustice. He relates to the sacrifices they made to serve their adopted country.

“We gave up so much. I gave up so much,” he says of the sacrifices made by men and women of the military. “If you have to earn the right to be here — a way of framing this conversation that I don’t agree with, by the way — but if you have to earn the right to be here, who has done more than these people?”

“We abandon our families,” he adds. “We leave them behind for a greater cause. That’s what these guys who have been deported are thinking. They risked their lives, they risked their families, they risked everything. And what do we do the moment they screw up? Kick them out of the country.”

Along with delivering supplies, Figueroa, with Barajas’ permission, has launched a GoFundMe page to raise money for the deported veterans. He knows his efforts are stopgaps rather than a permanent solution. Longterm, he wants to raise public pressure and lobby politicians for legislative support and immigration reform. He advocates naturalization for all foreign nationals who serve in the U.S. military.

“The fact that veterans are being deported signals that our immigration system is not perfect,” he says. “The U.S. government should work towards creating a comprehensive and realistic immigration process.”

Figueroa hopes to establish partnerships with allies in California and around the nation. Motivated by the experience he and the Cal Vet group had in Tijuana, and with a degree in business administration from Haas in hand, he’s reaching out to other veterans’ groups on college campuses for support. Down the road he’d like to create a 501(c)(3) to continue his efforts, but for now, thanks to the Stronach prize money, Figueroa figures he has enough funding for his work for the next year.

Williams believes that Figueroa is well-suited to the task.

“He’s someone that I have viewed as a unifier,” says Williams. “He’s someone that, in spite of challenges and setbacks, helps bring folks together toward a common goal.”

“When there’s danger, when there’s an issue or problem, he runs towards the fire,” Williams adds. “But he doesn’t run towards it with aggression. He’s running toward the problem leading with his heart.”

“This is my community,” says Figueroa. “These are my brothers and sisters from the military, and this is a topic that affects my community as a Latinx person. I know that supporting deported veterans is something that is going to be a huge part of the lives of people in historically underserved neighborhoods, of people in my community. This is my life’s work.”

Members of the Cal Boxing team train in the basement of the Recreational Sports Facility. Downstairs, below the pounding of feet on treadmills and bouncing of basketballs, there’s just enough room to squeeze a boxing ring between tall white walls. The sounds of leather popping leather echo down there, and the smell of sweat doesn’t ever seem to go away.

It was here, in the basement, where Jacque Garcia learned her craft from scratch, where she earned the respect of her coach and peers en route to becoming the president of Cal Boxing, and where she stewed over a semifinal defeat in the 2017 National Collegiate Boxing Association (NCBA) national tournament. It’s also where she shows off her 132-pound NCBA championship belt, her Outstanding Boxer Award and the Cal Boxing women’s third-place team award she helped win the following year.

And while there are many things that Garcia learned in the basement — how to twist her wrist to finish her punches, how to cut down the size of the ring to pressure her opponent, how to breathe through her combos — one thing she already knew how to do before she got to campus was fight.

Garcia grew up in Compton. The oldest of three, she says that she never really thought about college — the financial burden of higher education always seemed like an impossible barrier to clear. Her father is a landscaper, and her mother works in the home. But by the time she enrolled at Compton High, things had shifted. Teachers and counselors recognized her hard work and potential and funneled her toward mentorship programs like Elevate your G.A.M.E. and encouraged her to apply for a Posse Scholarship — a program that supports developing leadership among urban students, as well as provide pre-collegiate training and financial aid.

“I had no clue what any of that stuff meant,” Garcia says of the college application process and standardized testing like the SAT. “I had to reach outside of my high school to make sure that I was doing the things that would help me achieve what I wanted. It was stressful, but I had to be active about funding my own education.”

“My mother and father come from very humble backgrounds,” she adds. “I couldn’t rely on my parents to pay for my college, so I had to hustle to provide for myself. I learned that I have to be able to find my own resources and that you have to be very vocal about what you need.”

After being admitted to UC Berkeley, she interviewed for a Bergeron Scholars STEM Scholarship, which empowers students who identify as women and are majoring in STEM fields through mentorship and financial support.

During her scholarship interview, Garcia described the difficulty of her childhood in neighborhoods afflicted by gun violence, gang activity and poorly performing schools.

“To be believed in,” Garcia says, “I had to fight. I had to show that I did care about my education.” While students around her were giving up or being given up on, Garcia worked.

When applying for scholarships at Berkeley, her hard work did not go unnoticed.

“She is capitalizing on the promise of Cal,” says Diana Lizarraga, the director of the Cal NERDS program and part of the selection committee for the Bergeron scholars program. “She is that promise. The potential, the aspirations, the commitments to social justice in our community. She’s the type of student that we’re excited to have.”

Before Berkeley, boxing hovered in the periphery of Garcia’s world. Her father is a fan, and bouts featuring Mexico’s best punchers — like Julio César Chávez and Juan Manuel Márquez — aired in the background of her childhood. In high school, Garcia ran track and cross country and eventually — intrigued by the physical and technical demands of the sport — began wrestling. Optimistic that boxing would challenge her in a similar way wrestling had, Garcia tried out for the Cal Boxing team as a junior.

“What attracted me to boxing was that feeling that I had when I was wrestling,” says Garcia. “I want to be able to feel that I’m learning how to move my body efficiently and effectively, with the proper form and with accuracy, timing, speed and power.”

“It’s the technical aspect of it really attracted me,” she adds. “Using my brain and focusing it in a different way than academics felt really good. I loved it from the very first class. I knew I wanted to compete.”

Not everyone who participates in Cal Boxing is on the competition team. Because boxing is a combat sport and the risk of injury is apparent, only more advanced fighters who can defend themselves in the ring make the competition team and fight opponents from other schools. Before Garcia could fight, she would have to win over Cal Boxing coach Jon Zaul, something she did with her work ethic and attention to detail.

She turned heads in tryouts, explains Zaul, because of her “mental toughness, determination, dedication and positive attitude.”

“What stood out to me — and this is consistent with the rest of her character — was that she paid attention and really trusted the instruction,” says her coach. “Jacque is a true student of life. As I’ve gotten to know her, I learned that she’s usually the person who’s sitting in the front of class. She’s there, ready to learn, not showing off.”

The background in high school athletics didn’t hurt either. After demonstrating enough mastery to protect herself in the ring, Garcia joined the competition team within Cal Boxing. There, she took as many fights as she could get.

Coaches and teammates will tell you that one of Garcia’s strengths as a boxer is her timing, and championship timing is only possible by being acutely aware of others.

“As a leader, having that self-awareness and knowing what she needs to work on, how to lead to by example, and be in touch with other people’s needs allows her to think about the group as whole,” says Zaul.

Her commitment to others pushed her toward the presidency of Cal Boxing. An entirely student-run club, Garcia and her teammates are responsible for fundraising, travel and hosting matches.

“Our main objective in Cal Boxing is to develop as stronger, more confident people. Leaders with character,” says Zaul. According to her coach, Garcia has done just that.

A lover of math and science, Garcia initially declared chemical engineering as her major, but eventually flipped to computer science.

After researching her options, Garcia stumbled across Code the Change, an organization of computer science students from Berkeley and beyond who are interested in making social change an integral part of the computer science culture.

Until that point, Garcia had never coded in her life. She had to drop the engineering program and take classes undeclared, as well as learning how to code, before applying to enter the computer science program.

“It was scary,” she says. “But once I started, I couldn’t see myself doing anything else. I love that I could do something that provides a solution for other people, or help other people do what they need to do.”

Garcia now will graduate with a position as a software engineer at a startup in San Francisco called Circle CI. There, she will help other companies build and test their code prior to releasing their product.

And for any excess fear or anxiety, there was always boxing as an outlet.

Garcia lost her semifinal fight during the 2017 NBCA national tournament by unanimous decision to River Goh of Penn State. Both Zaul and Garcia believe the decision went against her because she wasn’t aggressive enough. Collegiate boxing is only three rounds long, and often the busier fighter will win a decision by dominating the action in the short time allotted.

The following year, Garcia and Goh were paired up again, this time in the championship round. The results were different, as it was Garcia’s hand that was raised by the referee. And while it would be easy for her to see the victory as personal redemption, Garcia was more proud that her performance helped lift her team to a third-place finish.

“They put so much time into me and so much effort into our club,” she says of her teammates and coach. “I just wanted to be able to get that title to give back for all the time they’d dedicated to the club.”

As Saturday’s commencement approaches, Garcia sees graduating as a team accomplishment too.

“Seeking help in high school and staying motivated despite all of the negativity around me was very difficult,” she says. “It was thanks to the teachers who believed in me and motivated me, that I didn’t lose focus. At Berkeley, it was thanks to coach Jon Zaul who taught me that training matters, practice matters, discipline matters that enabled me to overcome self-doubt.”

“Graduation is going to be very emotional,” says Garcia. “I didn’t start thinking about college until I was in the eighth grade. I didn’t know if I was going to go to college, I didn’t know how I was going to pay for it. It’s going to be a surreal moment. I can’t believe it’s happening.”

As a girl, Chansitha Ouk didn’t go to school.

“There was no school,” she says. “I didn’t know what it was. It just didn’t exist. Life was on the run.”

Ouk was born in Cambodia in 1968. The civil war between the Cambodian government and the communist Khmer Rouge had begun the year before. As early as she can remember, she and her family — her two younger sisters, mother and grandmother — were on the move.

“We would move at night from shelter to shelter,” she says. “I grew up always hearing guns shooting and bombings. We just didn’t have anywhere to go. It’s how all families were — alert, always moving.”

There was no school,” she says. “I didn’t know what it was. It just didn’t exist. Life was on the run.

It wasn’t until Ouk was 12, living in a refugee camp in Thailand, that she realized what she had been missing. She finally had the chance to go to school — to learn to read and write in her native language, Khmer. She even learned some basic English phrases and became an interpreter for the U.N.

“It was like a new world,” she says. “It was like the light went on. I was so hungry to learn.”

On Saturday, May 12, Ouk is joining more than 5,000 graduating seniors at UC Berkeley as they make their joyous walk across the California Memorial Stadium stage — a feat she never dreamed possible. She will receive a bachelor’s degree in media studies.

It’s her time at Berkeley, she says, that has given her the courage to share her story — one that she hopes will inspire people to push past any obstacle, no matter how big, to follow their dreams and pursue an education.

“My education at Berkeley healed my wounds and filled a deep emptiness,” she says.

Life on the run

During the war, as the oldest of three daughters, Chansitha was responsible for finding food for the family. Every day, the 5-year-old would venture out, with her 4-year-old sister as her lookout, to search farms and rice fields for anything they could eat — rice, vegetables, fish. It was never enough, but it kept them alive.

Chansitha’s father, before he got sick and died when she was a toddler, would call her his boy — she was the daring one, the risk-taker. As she got older, she would negotiate on behalf of her family, never taking ‘no’ for an answer.

“Boys were dominant — they always got their way,” says Ouk. “But we just had to do things to get by, to survive. We never said, ‘Oh, you’re a boy, I’m a girl, we have different roles.’”

Each night, the family would pack up their things and move to the next shelter, just bamboo and hay under a mango tree in the Cambodian jungle. Ouk doesn’t remember a time when she didn’t feel terrified. Hundreds of thousands were killed during the war, most of them civilians.

After the war ended in 1975 and the Khmer Rouge came to power, things got worse. Although her family — poor and uneducated — wasn’t specifically targeted by the Khmer Rouge, she says, they experienced misery and suffering like most Cambodians.

One day, the family, along with hundreds of others, was forced to walk for days to a labor camp in Kanghot. Anyone too weak to keep walking was left to die on the side of the road.

At the camp, everyone was required to attend public executions; anyone who the Khmer Rouge deemed an offender was beheaded and the severed heads were tied together by their hair and stacked to form an archway over the entrance as a warning.

After a few days, Chansitha, now 7, was separated from her family and sent to a child labor camp. This time she couldn’t negotiate. “You couldn’t cry,” she says. “They didn’t give us a chance to say goodbye to our families. They didn’t even tell you where you were being taken, so my mom had no idea where I was going to be.”

I began running like a deer. I sometimes stumbled and fell in the dark, but it didn’t slow me down. I felt free and euphoric. My mind was racing as I ran.

The camp’s leader developed an unexplained hatred for her and became determined to break her spirit or kill her trying. Chansitha was beaten by guards for every infraction and given the hardest, dirtiest jobs. Children avoided being seen with her, fearing punishment, making her feel more and more helpless and isolated. If she wanted to live, she resolved, she had to escape.

One night, after everyone was sleeping, she snuck past the guards and out of the camp. “I began running like a deer,” she says. “I sometimes stumbled and fell in the dark, but it didn’t slow me down. I felt free and euphoric. My mind was racing as I ran.”

But then she heard dogs barking in the distance. The guards caught up with her, tied her up and left her in a muddy ditch in a rice field. After two days in the scorching sun, the guards came, hosed her off and brought her to the leader, who ordered them to punish her. They beat her day after day, stopping only when she passed out.

Chansitha was weak and starving, about to die. “I was so skinny. They put me in a corner. I couldn’t even lift my arm to swat a fly. I could feel the flies coming around me. I felt so tiny, you know, just about to die.” She tried to cover her wounds with leaves and sand, causing severe infection and swelling.

One day, a woman wearing a sarong and headscarf like she remembers her grandma wearing came walking into the camp. Chansitha knew it couldn’t be her grandma, though, because she’d been sent to a different camp months before.

“And then, when I looked again, I saw the woman walking toward me. And again I thought, ‘She looks like my grandma.’ After a while, I stopped looking back.”

All of a sudden, Chansitha’s grandma walked right up to her granddaughter huddled in a corner and they both started sobbing.

Her grandma, hearing from a woman in Chansitha’s camp that she was about to die, had convinced the leader to let her come and get her granddaughter so she could die in her arms and receive a proper burial.

“I couldn’t say a word,” says Ouk. “I just let the tears drop.”

Taking her scarf from her head, her grandma wrapped it around Chansitha, saying, “You’re going to be alright, my granddaughter. You’re going to be okay.”

“My grandma is my hero,” says Ouk.

Top student as a refugee

Chansitha lived with her grandma until her mother, who had made it to the Thai border with her other children, sent for her. She didn’t want to leave her grandma, but eventually agreed if she could return after a visit. It was the last time she would see her grandma.

Walking every night for a month, accompanied by her uncle, Chansitha made it to the border and soon settled into a refugee camp in Thailand. It was there, at 12, that she began her education. “I was in heaven,” she says.

At first, her mom taught her how to read and write some basic words and phrases in Khmer. But soon, she had taught her daughter all she knew. Chansitha had heard of a temple where monks could teach her, so she began helping the monks keep the temple clean during the day and attending school at night.

When a school at the refugee camp opened, Chansitha was one of the first to enroll and quickly became a top student. She couldn’t afford a notebook, so she took notes on napkins and scraps of paper. The teachers started giving the top three students notebooks, which she often received but didn’t want to write in them. “I wanted to keep them clean,” she says, laughing. “I’m still collecting notebooks — I have 50 or 60 empty notebooks.”

She completed high school, then started learning English and soon became an interpreter for the U.N., often translating for older refugees in the camp. She was rewarded one frozen chicken a month — the highest salary she ever earned in the refugee camp, she says.

Through her work with the U.N., she got to know interpreters from around the world — Australia, Thailand, the U.K. She found out that they attended night school, where they would learn English from the Oxford dictionary. She couldn’t afford to attend, so she pulled up a chair outside the hut, peered through a hole in the bamboo and hay and wrote down vocabulary words in one of her precious notebooks.

After a while, other people caught on and started crowding around the hut, so the teachers covered up the hole.

But Chansitha knew she wanted to keep learning — no matter what it took.

A new beginning

Ouk never thought she’d get into UC Berkeley. It was a dream she didn’t even know she had until it came true.

After she and her family immigrated to San Jose, California, when she was 16, Ouk did odd jobs to get by. She picked strawberries, worked on an assembly line in an electronic company. She became a certified nursing assistant and worked in a convalescent home.

She heard that there was money in real estate, so she started her own insurance and real estate business, making enough to buy her own home in Morgan Hill, where she still lives.

When Ouk wasn’t helping families buy homes, she studied English. She’d watch the news, studying how reporters would say words and phrases. She watched PBS, listened to KGO radio. She enrolled in Gavilan Community College in Gilroy, not with the intention of graduating — she thought it was too late for her to get a college degree — but just to learn English.

After 10 years of community college, Ouk’s adviser told her she had taken all the classes the college had to offer and that it “was time to move on,” Ouk says with a laugh. She encouraged Ouk to apply as a transfer student to a four-year university. So she applied to San Jose State and — with a lot of convincing — to UC Berkeley.

She didn’t tell anyone she applied to Berkeley. “I just felt so embarrassed about my application,” she says. “I was hoping nobody would read it.”

But someone did, and she got in.

“I couldn’t believe it. It was beyond my wildest dreams,” she says.

At first, she didn’t tell anyone that she was accepted, in case she failed. “I didn’t believe in myself, not at all. Some people found out I went to Berkeley when they got my graduation announcement.”

She was chosen for the Miller Scholars Program, which each year provides 10 low-income, first-generation, community college transfer students a two-year stipend. Students are chosen for their leadership potential, academic achievement and commitment to community service and education.

During her first day of classes, Ouk met transfer student Matet Malit, a political science major, and the two became fast friends. Malit says Ouk’s positivity and support has helped her succeed at Berkeley.

“She’s very positive,” says Malit. “Anything negative, she doesn’t entertain. She’ll say, ‘Don’t think about it.’ She can do anything. She’ll do whatever it takes.”

Being at Berkeley, says Ouk, has inspired her to become an advocate for higher education. “I want to work as a mentor in community colleges to motivate the next generation,” she says. “I want to let students know that education is an asset that no one can take away from you. You can see a better world through education.”

She plans to apply to Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism next year, but in the meantime wants to finish an autobiography that she started writing with a friend a few years ago.

“Before I came to Berkeley, I just wanted to erase my past,” she says. “I had a new life, an opportunity to live again. I felt like talking about what happened wouldn’t help me at all. But my education… gave me the confidence to share my story.”

It’s a story she hopes will inspire people to keep working to achieve their dreams, no matter how far away they might seem.

When Identical twins Cameron and Tyler Haberman graduate in two weeks, they’ll sit side by side at the Greek Theatre and both receive undergraduate degrees from the Haas School of Business. Then they’ll hop a plane to explore Europe together and, when they return, head to dream jobs — both in finance — at Apple.

None of this surprises those who know the 21-year-olds well. The twins have shared nearly every step in life, from their upbringing in Visalia, a blue-collar city in the Central Valley, through four years at Berkeley, where they grew from nervous, first-generation college freshmen to honors students with bright futures and a deep commitment to helping others.

At Berkeley Haas, their passion for learning includes understanding gender and equity issues. They were two of five men who, along with 50 women, took the course “The Business Case for Investing in Women” taught by associate adjunct professor Kellie McElhaney.

McElhaney, founding director of the Center for Gender, Equity & Leadership, says the brothers “speak up a lot” in class. “They are humble, and they show vulnerability,” she adds. “They call themselves out on things they’ve done wrong in the past, and they advance others in the classroom.”

How does she tell them apart? “I don’t,” she says. “They sit in the same seats all the time, they’re always together, they do everything together, and they’re both equally amazing.”

Through thick and thin

Twins aren’t unusual at Berkeley. There were 120 sets of twins and triplets in the entering freshman class last fall, according to the Office of Undergraduate Admissions. But at Berkeley Haas, the Habermans are the only twins in their class and one of just two sets of twins in the undergraduate program.

Some twins exert their independence in college. But the Haberman twins’ idea of going their separate ways is living in different rooms in the same house. At Berkeley, they took most of the same courses, joined the Chi Phi fraternity, entered Berkeley Haas as juniors and interned at AT&T and then Apple.

“We’ve just always had similar interests,” says Cameron, who is one minute older than his brother. “We love the same sports — basketball and baseball — and the same subjects, we love to eat right and work out together.”

Tyler and Cameron study together, too, using a system Cameron developed freshman year that includes creating outlines and elaborate schedules for homework and test preparation. “It’s added efficiency to our lives,” he says.

They’ve come a long way since they were incoming freshmen with imposter syndrome.

“I thought everyone here was so much smarter than me,” says Tyler. “They had taken way more AP classes, scored higher on the SAT.”

They felt like outsiders, too. The brothers had only visited San Francisco once. They’d never been on an airplane. In Visalia, gang fights were a daily norm; bragging about good grades wasn’t. At Berkeley, they met sophisticated students from affluent cities around the world, many who had traveled extensively and largely shared the same liberal politics.

Finding their common wings

Gradually, the twins adjusted to life at Berkeley and started to thrive, waking up as early as 5 or 6 a.m. every day to work out at the gym before class.

They tackled tough courses together, including Math 1B, a calculus class that they now joke “nearly killed” them.

Cameron and Tyler studied for it for eight hours a day using Kahn Academy’s online resources. When they took the final, “I don’t think we’ve ever been more proud to get an A, and Tyler actually got an A+,” Cameron says. “I’d worked through some really tough hours with Tyler, struggling over problems, grinding it out until we did well.”

Tyler admits his brother is the better student who challenges him when he fades and thinks he can’t study anymore. “There will be times when I’m, like, ‘Dude, I want to play FIFA or sleep,’ and he’ll say, ‘Come on! You’ve got more in you,’” he says. Tyler credits that drive to having parents who always praised their efforts rather than results — a strategy called the “growth mindset” that Tyler later learned about in Berkeley Haas lecturer Holly Schroth’s class.

“I’ve never seen anyone go as hard as they do to accomplish a goal,” says their friend Parsa Attari, a senior majoring in computer science and cognitive science who has known the twins since freshman year. “They’re just so dedicated.”

Part of the twins’ decision to apply to Haas as sophomores was to learn to manage money, a skill that was lacking in their family. Says Tyler, “I knew that I wanted to be financially stable.”

At Apple, they will both work in the Finance Development Program with a group of new college graduates. They’ll be assigned to teams that rotate every 12 weeks and settle into more permanent roles after two years.

Sharing their Native American roots

The brothers’ Berkeley experience also included their ongoing work with the Native American community. Although their father is part Cherokee and their mother is part Muscogee, the twins knew very little about their Native American heritage until after they graduated from high school.

At Berkeley, they joined the Native American Recruitment and Retention Center, which works to keep higher education accessible and attainable for Native Americans.

Cameron and Tyler also took a few courses in Native American studies, which opened their eyes to the struggles of the nation’s indigenous peoples. “Back home, you heard, ‘The Indians are fine, they have casinos,’” Cameron says. “But they also have higher rates of incarceration and alcoholism, they earn less pay, they fall at the bottom in everything. I just felt like, if I can, I should be doing something to help out.”

Cameron’s first role with the recruitment and retention center was making posts to its Facebook page. He and Tyler then shared the task of being budget coordinator. The last two years, he says, they’ve been “immersed” in this group and its mission.

Haas alumna JoAnne Lee, former executive director of the center, which is now called the Indigenous and Native Coalition, says the twins were instrumental in helping her develop an outreach plan to expand the size of the group. “Once we did that,” she says, “the numbers grew. We went from four members to 17 and then to 30 people the following semester. Now they have 41 members.”

A doubly proud family

There are only a few ways to tell the twins apart.

Cameron has had surgery on his nose, which he’s broken three times; its slightly upturned shape is a fail-proof identification strategy.

Tyler has taken a few courses by himself, including “Leadership and Personal Development” and “Improvisational Leadership” with Berkeley Haas lecturer Cort Worthington. “I’ve gained more from those two classes than any classes at Cal,” Tyler says. “They’ve helped me to be a leader and to reframe how I look at the world.”

Their GPAs are also slightly different — 3.96 for Cameron, a member of Beta Gamma Sigma, the top business honor society, and 3.88 for Tyler.

At the Berkeley Haas graduation ceremony, with everyone in matching regalia, it may be difficult to distinguish one twin from the other, at least from a distance. But their parents, Tony and Victoria Haberman, and sister, Isabella, will know and feel pride for Tyler and Cameron’s achievements — separately and together.

The brothers’ dad, a computer technician, and mom, who worked overnight hours at the local grocery store in Visalia so that she could attend all of her sons’ high school basketball and baseball games, will head up from Visalia to cheer them on. So will their sister, who is attending Fresno State next year on a track scholarship.

“They made so many sacrifices for us. They were all about improving our lives so we didn’t have to go through what they did,” says Tyler. “To be the first people in the family to graduate — I don’t think my parents could be more proud. It’s cool to be able to give this to them.”

UC Berkeley alumnus Doug Harnsberger was hiking along California’s scenic John Muir Trail a few years ago when he came across a stone hut at the top of 11,955-foot Muir Pass, inside Kings Canyon National Park.

Harnsberger, a 1977 graduate in environmental design and architecture, is a trained historical architect and immediately knew the shelter was something special — he just didn’t know anything about it.

Almost as soon as he returned home to Pennsylvania, he started learning as much as he could about the hut.

The effort took him to UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, where he found the original 1930 blueprint for the building by Henry Gutterson, a 1905 graduate of Berkeley who was commissioned to build the hut by the Sierra Club. It was originally called the John Muir Memorial Shelter.

Harsnberger also pushed the National Park Service to place the hut on the National Register of Historic Places, a listing of buildings and places the government deems worthy of preservation for their historical significance.

Research is now underway to get the 16-foot-by-16-foot octagon hut — and the entire 210-mile John Muir Trail — recognized as a National Historic Landmark, which would place the Muir Hut among the country’s most significant structures. Other National Historic Landmarks include the White House and the Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House in Chicago.

“We have the architecture of a medieval stone structure from southern Italy showing up on the Muir Pass,” Harnsberger said. “This is a mountaineer’s version of that kind of shrine.”

Recognizing the hut as a landmark would honor Muir, who is generally considered to be the father of the National Park System, and protect the hut and trail for generations to come, Harnsberger said.

“A building does not last without maintenance,” Harnsberger said. “So far, this structure has lasted (almost) 100 years without maintenance, but it might not last another 100 years.”

As an 8-year-old, Luis Mora, like a lot of kids, walked home from school every day. He would take the same path home — across a covered bridge, down a flight of stairs and along the road until he got to his home in Quito, Ecuador.

One afternoon, as he crossed the footbridge, a teenager walked up to him, held a gun to the second grader’s chest and demanded his cell phone. (Mora’s parents, who worked long hours, had given their son a phone so they could easily stay in touch with him throughout the day.)

“I saw my whole life — all the memories from past Christmases, from past birthdays,” says Mora. “But then, I saw images of the future and knew I would be okay, that I wouldn’t die that day.” He calmly handed over his phone and the few coins he had in his pocket.

We’re just humans, like Americans, trying to achieve a better life. We all have dreams.

Being able to remain calm in a crisis, says Mora, now a third-year political science major at UC Berkeley, is what helped him get through nearly three weeks of detention by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He was released Jan. 17 with the help of Berkeley’s Undocumented Student Program and an outpouring of support from campus advocacy groups and top state leaders.

Back on campus, Mora says that despite all of the anti-immigration rhetoric that continues to intensify with the Trump administration and the controversy that has surrounded his detainment and release, he feels stronger and more focused than ever.

“I believe everything happens for a reason,” he says. “My detainment has motivated me in a way to get my message out there — that this is what immigration really looks like. We’re just humans, like Americans, trying to achieve a better life. We all have dreams.”

Mora believes it’s his responsibility to help people understand that immigration isn’t going away — our country was built, and continues to function, because of immigrants.

After Mora was robbed at gunpoint a second time, when he was 10, his mother decided it was time to leave Ecuador. She wanted her only son to be able to grow up and pursue an education without the daily threat of violence. She also had cancer and knew she could get better treatment in the U.S. So she got two six-month visas and they moved to California, first to Los Angeles, then settling in San Diego.

Mora says his mother, a doctor and a missionary, taught him how to express himself in a way that encourages people to listen — not with anger, but with a kind of peaceful strength. It’s something that has inspired him to become an outspoken advocate for the undocumented community at UC Berkeley and across the nation.

Meng So, the director of the Undocumented Student Program, which serves the campus’s nearly 500 undocumented students, describes Mora as “a bottle of optimism and positive energy mixed with Red Bull.”

At 20 years old, Mora has an easy way about him. His gait is unhurried and his smile is wide. He seems undistracted, focused on the moment and conversation he’s having. He seems comfortable with who he is and has the air of a leader, someone who will stay true to himself no matter the hardship.

Undocumented immigrants like Mora, So says, learn from an early age that they have to find a kind of inner resilience to navigate through challenges of being on the outer margins of society. But he adds, in today’s political climate, resilience isn’t enough.

“Our students need other people to step up and to really push for immigration reform that upholds their dignity, their sense of being human and their sense of community,” Says So. “Immigration isn’t just an immigrant issue; it’s a human issue.”

When Mora was released from custody, he was eager to get back to Berkeley. Although he’d missed a couple of days of classes, he jumped back into his studies — he’s taking a full 17 credits — with a renewed sense of purpose.

“I’ve lived through it,” he says. “It’s my goal to help the many future generations of immigrants who are still going to come to this country.”

He’s already begun. He’s donated more than $8,000 in bond payments — part of the $15,000 raised for his release through a social media campaign spearheaded by the campus immigrant rights group, Rising Immigrant Scholars through Education — to other immigrants held in the same detention center that he was.

We will be unwavering in our fight… and keep moving forward with love over fear.

And he won’t stop there. He has decided to pursue a career as an immigration judge, with the goal of reforming immigration policy to help undocumented immigrants secure legal status in the U.S.

Meanwhile, Mora awaits a trial before an immigration judge in San Francisco, scheduled for March, and continues to work toward securing legal citizenship by the time he graduates in 2019.

So says he and his team at the Undocumented Student Program will continue to be resolute in their belief and support of students, no matter the cost. Students like Mora, he adds, give him the courage to keep fighting every day

“We will be unwavering in our fight,” he says. “Our work will be harder, scarier and more urgent than ever. I don’t know how we will do it, but we will keep pushing. And keep moving forward with love over fear.”

Although his future is still uncertain, Mora says he’s sure that he’s on the right path, being a voice for so many who have been voiceless for too long.

The villages that Neha Zahid was traveling to in Nepal are not easy to find. Up a massive hill, removed from modern conveniences, Puranchaur and Hansapur are home to about 7,000 people, mostly impoverished, at least in part, due to their remoteness. And yet, even here in rural Nepal, Zahid saw roadside food stands stocked with processed snacks and soft drinks.

“They don’t have access to important health services but they have access to junk food,” Zahid said. “The Pepsi truck can drive up this hill, but the community can’t get what they really need.”

Easy access to junk food has created an oral health crisis in villages like these. Rotten teeth, dental pain and malnutrition are common here. Zahid, a junior double major in public health and molecular biology at UC Berkeley, came here in the winter of 2016 with a UC Berkeley-UCSF team of Karen Sokal-Gutierrez, a medical doctor and professor in the UC Berkeley-UCSF Joint Medical Program, in collaboration with a local Nepali non-profit organization, Jevaia Oral Health Care, to teach proper nutrition and oral hygiene, provide basic preventive dental care and emergency treatment, and measure indicators of oral health and nutrition in the local children and families.

Hands-on research experiences like these have become a hallmark of the Berkeley undergraduate education, where students are participating in discovery experiences that are the very essence of research.

Back when she was a freshman molecular biology major with medical school aspirations, everything Zahid studied was microscopic, so connecting classroom lessons to the outside world was a struggle. She was interested in public health but had only taken one public health class, so she sought out a summer research project to help her figure out if public health work matched her interests.

She found Sokal-Gutierrez, a pediatrician and leading expert in the field of nutrition and oral health in developing countries, who runs the Global Children’s Oral Health and Nutrition program, which she founded in 2004 after noticing an epidemic of tooth decay in children in rural El Salvador (For more on Sokal-Guiterrez’s work, read this Berkeley News feature story from 2012). With 14 years of experience coordinating nutrition and oral health interventions for underserved communities around the world, and published research on the success of these interventions, Sokal-Gutierrez’s research seemed like the perfect blend of service and research that Zahid was seeking.

Zahid joined Sokal-Gutierrez’s team at the beginning of her sophomore year doing data cleaning and entry, and reviewing the scientific literature on children’s nutrition and oral health. The following winter she traveled to Nepal with the team for two weeks. Like the hundreds of students that have worked with the team since its inception, Zahid raised her own funds to cover airfare and other costs for the trip. Zahid assisted the team in serving hundreds of children and adults — teaching toothbrushing, weighing and measuring children and adults, working with dentists to record the dental exams, and performing surveys.

“Working closely together in the field, I got to see Neha shine,” Sokal-Gutierrez said.

Based on her research experience and Sokal-Gutierrez’s recommendation, Zahid was awarded a prestigious fellowship in the Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program for the summer of 2017. For her fellowship, she returned to fieldwork, this time for four weeks in El Salvador. The team, which included Sokal-Gutierrez, Berkeley graduate Claudia Campos, and Berkeley students Priyanka Achalu, Andrew Chang, Ibrahim Ramoul, and Nikki Sherry, worked in collaboration with a Salvadoran non-profit health organization called ASAPROSAR to conduct the nutrition and oral health intervention as well as focus groups with mothers to learn more about their family’s nutrition and oral health. Zahid helped develop focus group questions, worked with the team to collect and analyze the data in the field, and explored new risk factors, such as gender differences.

These interventions have a history of success. In 2016, Sokal-Gutierrez published a study on their interventions on 886 children in El Salvador from 2006 to 2010, which found that incorporation of a community oral health education and fluoride supplementation program contributed to significant reductions in cavitated lesions, called caries, (from 74 to 61 percent) and mouth pain (from 58 to 39 percent), in children 3–6 years of age. Data on their interventions in Ecuador found similar improvements in tooth decay and mouth pain, but also a 39 percent decrease in stunting malnutrition.

The mixture of quantitative data from the dental camps and qualitative data from the focus groups introduced Zahid to the unique powers of each in telling a complete story about a community’s health.

Now entering the spring of her junior year, Zahid is coordinating the student team that’s returning to Nepal in December, and is poised to be the lead author on at least one research publication stemming from her research experiences.

“I believe that she will continue on a trajectory to become a leader in public health and medicine, in the U.S. and globally, especially for underserved populations,” Sokal-Gutierrez said.

Zahid still sees medical school in her future, but not right away. She plans to continue public health work in the short term, possibly through a master’s degree in public health. When she does go into medicine, she wants to focus on a field that has an impact on public health. This has a been a revelation about her career interests that was only possible by diving into a research project head first to see if it was a good fit for her. It’s an experience that she encourages other Berkeley students to take advantage of.

“Research was a way for me to understand what I’m really passionate about,” Zahid said. “I’m now a double major because my research experience opened my eyes to the importance of interdisciplinary work. Research is a really great way to learn about your interests that you might not discover just based on the classes you are taking.”

Despite the many challenges of working in the field — cold and warm weather, long days of work, bumpy bus rides to rural sites, different food and beverages, and pressing crowds of children and families — Zahid cherished the experience.

“The work we do is an ideal example of a public health intervention on a community scale, but the lessons we learn from people who live in the community are far more heartfelt and personal than what I could have expected,” Zahid said.

Do you know a student who is thriving at Berkeley? We want to tell their story. Email us at publicaffairs@berkeley.edu.