Neil McClintick

A shout out during convocation for transfers is not enough to mitigate these feelings of exclusion. The UC Berkeley community, with its rigorous academics, can and should undergo a paradigm shift in how it receives transfer students. This starts at an interpersonal level with each of y’all.

Venture into the realm of financial voodoo and enigmatic budgetary rules, and you’ll find one particular plague upon the K-14 education system: the once widely beloved Proposition 13.

After eight weeks of reproaching UC Berkeley’s particular treatment of transfers — from housing to campus climate — I’ll still gladly tell prospective transfers that they should shoot for becoming a golden bear.

Uninspired — a cramped afterthought awkwardly relegated to a shared occupancy with the Student Parent Center — the Lower Sproul Plaza-based transfer center spearheads a genuine mission ultimately crippled by an inexcusable lack of financial support from the campus.

Two years — that’s the magic number. It’s roughly how long I spent killing dragon functions to hit the then-maximum level of 70 in World of Warcraft.

UC Berkeley transfer student Begonia Herbert was only five years old when her mother left because of her father’s physical abuse, setting a haunting precedent of familial strife.

With a hushed snippet preceding subsequent murmurs, one of my peers dashed outside. Like a spray of Axe in a middle school locker room, the news spread far and phenomenally quickly — my peer, a transfer student, had gotten into Stanford University.

Since moving to Berkeley seven weeks ago, I lost a job I only had for a week, fell behind on five weeks of reading and failed to declare my major on four separate occasions.