Documentary screenings on campus

Documentaries are a form of film art that have long been used to tell the true stories and histories of various people, while nonetheless serving as an artistic expression. In this sense, they form a unique intersection between creativity and awareness of social issues. Students have been utilizing documentary screenings on campus as a means of spreading awareness of issues they are passionate about and mobilizing action toward addressing these issues.

Justin Kaplan, a third-year political science major, has been a part of this documentary culture as president of Aggies For Humanity (AFH). As a part of its work, AFH holds occasional documentary screenings about various issues, and recently held a screening of The Human Harvest, a documentary which explores organ harvesting crimes in China.

“I didn’t know that was an issue,” Kaplan said.

Kaplan appreciates that documentaries often portray an issue from someone else’s perspective. He found that what viewers might believe to be a solution to an issue may not be fully appropriate for the people living in that reality.

“Our issue for Aggies For Humanity this year was homelessness,” Kaplan said. “Toward the beginning of the year we did [a screening] about homelessness in San Francisco. It was interesting to see — from the perspective of the homeless people of course — [that] some of the people had the disposition that being homeless wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. It reminded me of some rural Middle Eastern community where a Western nonprofit organization went in and built houses for people, because they didn’t have houses [there]. When they built these homes, the people ended up using them for their livestock. [So] it’s easy to look at someone and say, ‘hey, you don’t have something, obviously my way of life is better’ — but it’s not always that case. It’s important to tackle these issues from others’ perspectives.”

Lily Karim, a first-year biomedical engineering major and a member of the Sexual Assault Awareness and Advocacy Committee , spearheaded a screening of The Hunting Ground in April — Sexual Assault Awareness Month. She chose to hold a documentary screening instead of presentation because she believed it would be a more effective way to communicate complex realities.

“I can’t really tell the stories of sexual assault as well as actual victims and people who are fighting for better treatment towards victims all the time,” Karim said. “I could’ve done a presentation on sexual assault and rape culture on college campuses, but I think that this movie and hearing these testimonies from victims was much more impactful. [And] there’s a lot of documentaries about toxic masculinity and how that plays a role in rape culture and gender norms, [which] really harm the ability to overcome gender-based violence”

Karim also believes there is an educational value in engaging with these first-person  narratives.

“I just [feel] it’s a really good idea to mix our education with supplemental resources such as documentaries,” Karim said, “especially having it in an environment where you have to actively seek out and choose this kind of education. When someone has a lot of passion and seeks out primary sources of information, there’s just something really effective about it. [But] I think that it’s not just the education component to it that we need to consider — it’s also the ability to create an emotional response.”

Anita Yu, a fourth-year political science and English double major and president of the Davis Filmmaking Society, receives many requests for documentary screenings and help with publicity. Most of those who reach out to Yu are passionate about a social issue and want help in spreading awareness.

“I get the sense that a lot of people who do documentary screenings want to inspire change on campus in a very real way,” Yu said. “From the pattern [of requests], it’s not just screening a documentary to say ‘this is a problem,’ they also say ‘this is a problem and we can do something about it.’ That seems to be very much the intention of every documentary screening that I’ve heard about.”

However, Yu complicated the idea of straightforward storytelling by a documentary. Even though the film shares true stories, it is nonetheless framed by a person with their own creativity and ideas. But at the same time, Yu believes that such an artistic expression can sometimes be a more true rendition of one’s story than simply stating facts.

“I do think documentaries are so inspiring,” Yu said. “They’re so probing. They’re like a video essay, but fun to be a part of, fun to consume and learn from. It’s so artful. Just because it’s about true stories, doesn’t mean the very art of the film form is irrelevant. It’s actually really important.”

Whatever their chosen creative outlet may be, Aggies are actively fighting for causes that they are passionate about. Whether it is through concerts for refugees or a night of poetry, these forms of art become the scaffolding upon which social issues can be manifested, talked about and fought for.

“There are plenty of ways to do it,” Kaplan said. “These issues aren’t fun [the creative outlet is good] to try and — not necessarily see the light — but to remain optimistic in these situations that [through] what we are doing, even in small Davis, somehow we are making a difference.”

Written by: Sahiti Vemula — features@theaggie.org

UC Davis faculty reflect on their transitions out of undergraduate careers

Professor Susan Taber Avila’s first thought after her graduation from UCLA in 1982 with a degree in textile design was a feeling that many students can relate to this spring.

“I kind of panicked,” Avila said. “I enrolled in a typing class. I thought [that] I better learn how to type so I can at least get a job as a secretary.”

With commencement just around the corner, UC Davis students — both those graduating this quarter and those finding themselves simply thinking of “the real world” with an air of desperation — are thinking about, and doubting, what they should do next.

Avila, now the chair of the Design Department, found her way not by deciding immediately what she wanted to do after graduation, but by taking every opportunity she encountered. She spent the first few years after graduation restoring antique textiles, working as a studio assistant, selling handmade belts, scarves and matching vests on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles and exhibiting her own work.

“At school you’re paying to learn stuff,” Avila said. “The next year out, you’re still learning stuff but you’re not necessarily paying to learn stuff anymore. I think students put too much pressure on getting the perfect job right away, and sometimes the imperfect job is just what you need.”

After moving to Oakland for cheaper studio space, she found a day job at Planned Parenthood and didn’t decide to go back to get her master’s degree until the ‘90s. After graduating from UC Davis with her Master of Fine Arts in textile arts and costume design in 1996, she took the opportunity to teach as an adjunct professor and has been a faculty member of the university ever since.

“It’s sort of a circuitous route that got me here, but I think my own experience has made me keenly aware of students,” Avila said. “I’ve had many a student come to me just crying because they don’t know […] what they’re supposed to be doing. There’s designers out there who didn’t study design, who came to it later in life or by other means. If you have a passion for something, there’s no reason why you can’t shift and do that.”

Encouraging students to take advantage of faculty connections, internships, research and projects that come with a university environment is one of her focuses as department chair, as any kind of experience can lead a student in a direction they had never before considered. But still, the question prevails of how one can get out and meet these opportunities head-on.

“I get that some people worry that they’ll become a Cheez-Its-eating lounge lizard [after graduation], not doing anything — [but] I don’t think so,” said professor of nutrition Liz Applegate. “You have a discipline you developed here at UC Davis and you [will] keep that intact. You got here by being disciplined [and] by being a hard worker. You’re going to still be that way.”

Before becoming a professor of nutrition and the director of the sports nutrition program, Applegate spent her undergraduate and graduate careers taking advantage of opportunities that helped her forge her own way on campus — something she couldn’t predict when she started on a pre-med track as a biochemistry major at UC Davis. Also, if it weren’t for her major professor who told her that she had to improve her writing skills, she would never have written her books, graduate thesis and articles for magazines like Runner’s World.

“I wish I had known [in my undergraduate career] how important writing was for my success,” Applegate said. “Every letter, every word is painful — I’m not comfortable with writing, but I do it all the time. I can’t emphasize enough to students that […] both written and oral communication skills are of the utmost [importance] and I was never told that. The [worker] that is the better communicator is the most successful, in my mind.”

Applegate’s success in her postgraduate career came through dedication and hard work, but not without a price. Applegate described a feeling of self-doubt once she graduated, something anyone embarking on a new chapter can identify with.

“I [had] always felt like I was inadequate, that there’s got to be other people who can do a better job,” Applegate said. “While smarts and intellect is part of your performance, the other part of your performance and your success is being a hard worker, respectful to others, organized [and to] get your work done on time.”

English professor Frances Dolan has found that this feeling of inadequacy unfortunately prevails all through life, and that figuring out one step in a post-graduation career path does not provide a solution — thankfully, this kind of feeling is what grounds even the most impressive graduates.

“Either you have a robust and inaccurate sense of your worth, or you’re most of us,” Dolan said. “Most of us are really haunted by the sense that we’re not smart enough, [and that] we don’t belong here. We all have those feelings.”

Dolan walked to Loyola University in Chicago from her parents’ house all four years of her undergraduate career to study English and classics and immediately pursued a graduate degree in English literature across town at the University of Chicago. Growing up with an Irish-Catholic background, it was out of the norm in her family for her to move to a different neighborhood after graduation. Because of this, Dolan remembered being excited to move on but recognized that she was working on autopilot.

“I worked really hard as a college student and then — boom — there I was in graduate school,” Dolan said. “In some ways I had a very limited scope of action [and]  in many ways it would have been great for me to work or do something else after college. Sometimes I think when I talk to students they want to know if I had this vision of my life, which I completely did not have.”

Despite the immediate transition into graduate school, Dolan’s path didn’t come without some perfectly-timed failures. Dolan spent many summers and school years working in her father’s office, being berated by bosses for her performance as a program assistant in the Newberry Library and even walking around the Weebles department store dressed as Mr. Potato Head — a job that taught her “that I have no dignity.”

“Don’t be afraid to fail — I learned the most in my life from the stuff that I did badly,” Dolan said. “It’s precisely because I had actually moved directly through [my academic career] in this way that I tend to encourage students […] to do some different things. The more experience that you get, the more you think of every experience as an opportunity.”

As Dolan moves along in her career, she reminds herself to take everything a year at a time, and advises graduating seniors to do the same.

“It has worked well for me in life to often think ‘well, what would I enjoy doing for the next year?’ — which is not exactly not a long-term plan,” Dolan said. “The more you can actually value your own responses and scrutinize them […is] really helpful. And you never stop doing it.”

Susan Keen, an associate dean and professor of biological sciences, decided to take two years to work as a lab technician after her graduation from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

“I thought I would always go back to school,” Keen said. “That real-world experience gets you in good stead.”

However, while at University of Michigan at Ann Arbor for her graduate studies, Keen decided to take a year to assist a colleague with their research — in South America.  

“At the time i was very worried that the whole year will damage my career,” Keen said. “And it was silly — but at the time, I didn’t know that was silly. I think very little can actually derail your whole life. At least, that’s my suspicion.”

According to Keen, very few people have a plan from birth that they set out on and accomplish in an ideal time frame. Instead, she described it as a process, with one step taken at a time. Expecting that every step will work is “just not realistic.”

“Sometimes you learn more when it doesn’t work than when it does work,” Keen said. “You also think that you’re supposed to have a path, and really almost nobody has a path unless they look backward.”

What’s important to remember at any turning point is to ground oneself in a search of happiness and self-improvement — no pressure from outside sources or what one believes is expected of them can justifiably forge a life outside of an undergraduate career. After all, this is not the beginning of life, it is “just a part of your life.”

“[If I could go back] I would tell myself to calm down, it’s going to be okay, you’ll land on your feet,” Avila said. “Lifelong learning is really important. Maybe I thought I was done with learning, but the reality is that I’m constantly learning, and the more I learn the more I need to learn.”

Written By: Emilie DeFazio — features@theaggie.org

Making accessibility, accommodations for employees with disabilities a norm on campus

From top-of-the-line voice recognition software to tables that height-adjust depending on load weight, UC Davis’ accommodations for employees with occupational and cognitive disabilities are becoming increasingly ubiquitous. However, many issues still persist.

Tim Kerbavas, the special event support technical director for UC Davis’ Academic Technology Services, was working at an event when he fell off a stage and sprained his ankle. Coming back an hour later in crutches, he started to consider the circumstances those with disabilities face daily.

“The aisles are too narrow and I can’t get past the chairs,” Kerbavaz said. “I came back with a temporary disability and realized I [couldn’t] get around this event that I’m running. It was this wake-up call, like, ‘I am contributing to all these events.’ I’m a part of the problem here.”

Those without disabilities often find it difficult to identify the widespread lack of accessibility across campus and the daily problems it causes for those with disabilities. Kerbavas spoke at UC Davis’ fourth annual Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) on Thursday, May 18 among other concerned UC Davis faculty and staff working to engage with more accessible university practices.

Many GAAD speakers emphasized how accessibility improvements help not only those with disabilities, but the entire population as a whole. The application of a concept called universal design accomplishes this.

“We would like more instructors, faculty and [teaching assistants] to be aware of these principles and to be applying them,” said Dr. Cara Harwood-Theisen, an education specialist at UC Davis’ Center for Educational Effectiveness.

Universal design encapsulates the idea of access for all, anticipating the needs of a wide range of potential individuals by considering factors such as height, reading skill and auditory and visual capabilities.

“Rather than designing experiences with the average user in mind, we consider what we know as a diverse population and their needs,” Harwood-Theisen said.

While California’s population of working-age individuals with disabilities is the largest in the country, California’s total number of individuals with disabilities is 42nd nationally. Disabilities are often not congenital and instead are acquired through work and aging among the common population.

“It’s one thing that will hit all of us at some point — as we get older, the more disabilities we’ll have,” said Joshua Hori, an accessible technology analyst for UC Davis’ Student Disability Center. “I didn’t have tinnitus when I was younger. I didn’t have anxiety when I was young. As the environment changes, so will your disabilities.”

Though widely varying depending on type of work, UC Davis’ departments have set practices to anticipate, prevent and accommodate injuries and disabilities. All of its delivery and mail staff have lift gates and hand trucks to carry heavy items. Faculty and staff with offices choose from three types of chairs and endless combinations of keyboard, monitor and desk configurations, as office work can often result in repetitive motion injuries.

“We spend a lot of time coaching and training supervisors so that they understand [disabilities] law,” said Dave Ritz, a vocational rehabilitation counselor for UC Davis’ Disabilities Management Services. “We have developed partnerships and case coordination meetings monthly with large departments so that we’re able to do on-the-spot training, talk about cases [and] talk about accommodations.”

Ritz explained the organic conversation an individual with an injury or disabilities can have with their employer to receive effective job accommodations through the American Disabilities Act of 1990-mandated Interactive Process.

“The Interactive Process is a good-faith conversation with an employee about what we can do to help you,” Ritz said. “There’s no right words, there’s no wrong words, there’s no buzzwords, there is no step A, step B, step C.”

Supervisors engage in the Interactive Process with their employees to assess their limitations, often review a medical note and determine the best way to make accommodations. Employees’ precise disabilities remain confidential and usually are not disclosed at all.

With some resources and creativity, UC Davis employers usually make accommodations with no loss to any party and rarely find providing accommodations unattainable.

“For example, we have some custodians that have bad knees.” Ritz said. “We let [them] use the elevator. Now, that person can’t clean the stairwell and so they have to clean more bathrooms or vacuum more and somebody else is going to clean the stairwell. […] That’s why we can make accommodations for everything if we try to think about it.”

Especially when compared to other employers, UC Davis offers a variety of solutions for employees with disabilities.

“I’ve never had [this support] anywhere else,” Hori said. “Here, I have a slew of options. PG&E, Wells Fargo, […and] even on military bases — nope, nothing.”

With new accessibility technology created every year and several university units dedicated to implementing them, the percentage of UC Davis’ population helped by disability services has tripled since 2007 to 4.4 percent, according to Ritz.

However, many of UC Davis’ employees do not report their disabilities or have not been reached by the services. Accessibility still has much room for improvement.

“I feel bad touting [campus accessibility] like a good thing because we should have been doing this forever,” Kerbavaz said. “How do we fix these things before it affects […] an attendee or presenter’s ability to be a part of an event?”

Despite lack of complete accessibility, UC Davis recognizes disabilities as part of campus diversity and accessibility as part of social equity. In the past, and even presently, many institutions have not.

“Being told you can’t fly, you can’t do this, you can’t do that,” Hori said. “There’s going to be somebody who’s going to prove you wrong. We have a blind optometrist here. We have a deaf music professor here.”

Ritz said that while supervisors on an individual level readily make accommodations for staff with disabilities, fear of lawsuits under disabilities law historically has driven much of the systematic change toward universal accessibility in colleges.  

Written by: Kristen Leung — features@theaggie.org

Students from different UC campuses share ideas about each other

Ever wonder what other UC students think about UC Davis? Bikes, cows and agriculture are all words often used to describe Davis. It’s that one farming school in the middle of nowhere, right? Not exactly. But since California residents and students tend to generalize each of the UCs, labels get thrown around to describe every campus, helping spread surface-level conclusions.

California has nine undergraduate UC schools and each has its own personality. There are a lot of preconceived notions about each campus and, whether they are correct or not, they circulate throughout California’s population. For example, Jason Chay, a fourth-year mechanical engineering major at UCLA, sees Davis as a bike-friendly agricultural town.

“Davis has cows, a lot of cows, a lot of bikes. [It’s] flat and very ag-based,” Chay said.

According to Derik Bessler, a second-year aerospace engineering major at UCLA, even people who do not know much about the area know that Davis is farm-centric.

“The first thing that comes to mind is that it’s a cow town, you know, farm-y,” Bessler said. “When I think of Davis […] first thought is maybe like ‘oh they didn’t get into a certain UC they wanted.’”

While Davis is ranked high academically, some students refer to it as “UCDidn’t get into LA or Berkeley.”

But UCLA students also get labelled as students who likely did not get their first-choice UC.

“We are Berkeley and Stanford rejects,” Chay said. “We are the kids who tried really hard to get into Berkeley but got rejected but now still try hard.”

The UCLA stereotypes reach further than the reason the students are there, according to Bessler.

“There’s lots of hills [here] so everyone is like ‘oh, so you must have really good legs and calves’ — UC Legs and Ass — that’s what people say sometimes,” Bessler said. “Everyone is really into school spirit, I feel like more people who go here are very pro-UCLA, like they’ll let you know they are going there.”

According to David Sun, a fourth-year civil engineering major at UC Irvine, UCI is commonly described as a commuter school.

“One of the biggest things that you’ll hear is that UCI is a commuter school which a lot of people experience in their first year,” Sun said. “Most of their friends go home from the halls even if they are dorming — which is something that I definitely experienced — a lot of times people will say the social life is kind of dead on campus.”

While Irvine isn’t known as party city, UC San Diego is the campus that has been dubbed “UC Socially Dead.”

“Socially dead, that pretty much sums it up — UC San Diego […] but the location is really nice,” Bessler said.

UC San Diego is known to have a quieter social scene but is in a gorgeous area of California, which draws students in. Similarly, UC Santa Barbara boasts a wonderful location, but its main draw for students is the social scene.

“Well, I know everyone thinks that we party too much and that it’s just a big party school and that there is a lot of drugs and alcohol — kind of like a no-rules place,” said Ian Schwann, a third-year psychology major at UCSB.

Whether or not UCSB lives up to its stereotype, students from all over the UC system know Santa Barbara as a beachy party town.

“From a social standpoint, you definitely think it’s one of the higher party schools of the UCs,” said Austin Chadwick, a fourth-year molecular biology major at UC Santa Cruz. “Strong Greek life presence, beachy, a lot of skateboarding and good weather is probably the stereotype. I’m picturing short-shorts, tank-top riding around on a little Penny board, very bro’ed out, a lot of like social gathering — that’s kind of how I’m picturing them.”

One UC in particular is known for its competitive cutthroat nature, according to Drew Fagerlin, a first-year economics major at UC Berkeley.

“Everybody is a try-hard,” Fagerlin said. “People are mean, competitive, always busy and they think they’re better than everybody.”

Since UC Berkeley is known as having a “know-it-all” crowd, it is interesting to see how many other UC students are upset about being more or less Berkeley rejects.

“People who go to Berkeley are very smart, some of them have an ego,” Bessler said. “They are very academically motivated and driven, very liberal [with] hippie kind of vibes there.”

And while Berkeley is thought to have a lot of hippies, it is nothing compared to the Slug Capital of the UCs — Santa Cruz.

“UCSC is definitely super liberal, a lot of like hippie, nature stereotypes,” Chadwick said. “I think a lot of people think of it as a forest because it’s like very outdoorsy and natural, like a free-spirited kind of thing, compared to most of the other UCs that are more urban and city-like.”

According to Bessler, UC Santa Cruz is one of the most relaxed UCs in the system.

“My first off-the-bat thought when I think of stereotypes of [UCSC] is that they are all super laid-back stoners,” Bessler said.

While Santa Cruz is thought of as a chill scene, other UC’s, such as Riverside, are known for their rave culture.

“UC Riverside’s nickname is Ratchetside,” Sun said. “A stereotype is there is nothing to do in Riverside so the gyms are really packed and people get really fit just because there is nothing to do. A lot of them are very into raves.”

According to Sun, UC Riverside can be summed up in one sentence:

“People there know how to party, they have good concerts, they are buff [and] there is nothing to do,” Sun said.

Last but not least is UC Merced,  the newest addition to the UC system. Young in age and located in central California, it is often forgotten, according to Alex Benson, a fourth-year economics major at UC Davis.

“Where even is Merced?” Benson said.

Written by: Elizabeth Marin  — features@theaggie.org