“Marble” aims to create a new way for UC Davis students to connect

For a group of six UC Davis students, two years of hard work and dedication recently came to fruition as their social media app, “Marble,” hit the app store on Thursday, March 30.

Marble, which is currently available on iOS for students with UC Davis email accounts, started as an idea of UC Davis student Will Finch, a fifth-year managerial economics major, who set out to create an app that would make finding and connecting to groups and events easier and more efficient. Finch found that current social media platforms still lacked some vital components.

“I was inspired to make this app when I realized that there wasn’t a good way to share large amounts of photos and video on a mobile device in a format that was both enjoyable to look at and told a story,” Finch said in an email interview.

After showing some simple mockups of the app to friends and students around campus, Finch realized that Marble would be perfectly suited for Davis students.

“I decided to make the app UC Davis exclusive and cater to student groups since it was a niche I thought the app would be well suited for and other people weren’t catering to,” Finch said.

Ted Mumford, a fifth-year community and regional development major and co-founder of Marble, was intrigued by the idea of the app as soon as Finch showed him the basic concepts and page layouts. Like Finch, Mumford realized that it could provide a much-needed service to UC Davis students in particular, as the immense size of both UC Davis and its student population often led to on campus clubs being less accessible.

“As a Davis student (especially as a freshman), it was unfortunately very common to hear students groaning about Davis being boring and nothing going on,” Mumford said via email. “As you probably experienced just as I did, the longer you’re at UCD and the more people you meet, the more events and groups doing cool stuff you discover. Then, you walk outside the CoHo and you see 15 clubs all looking for new members or trying to tell people about their upcoming performance. We saw a problem we thought we could fix: groups need more members and event attendees, and students want to know what’s going on around campus and how to get involved.”

Along with a friend who helped develop the app and three friends who helped with marketing, Finch and Mumford set out to make their idea a reality. Described by Finch as a hybrid between Instagram and Snapchat, the main goal of Marble is to create a platform through which people can locate and discover groups and events that might appeal to them. Its unique approach to covering social groups and events make it potentially appealing to numerous students who feel frustrated by other social media platforms. Noah Diamant, a second-year political science major and Marble beta tester, can attest to the convenience and accessibility Marble provides.

“When I was a freshman I spent hours searching on Facebook for the cross country club,” Diamant said via email. “I knew I wanted to be on a cross country team but I didn’t know anyone on the team or their exact name on on Facebook. On Marble all someone has to do is go to the sports category and all the sports clubs will be there for you to view the profiles of […] The ease of access is astonishing and exactly what incoming freshman, as well as current students looking to get more involved, need.”

Marble incorporates a mosaic design which allows group members, event organizers and attendees to post pictures, videos and text to their group’s mosaic in order to show what their group did that day. The photos and videos posted to mosaics disappear after 24 hours in order to encourage a constant stream of content and ensure that students can see the most up to date happenings of specific groups. The mosaic design also serves to expand the scope of what students can see on the app.

“The main advantage for students is the scalability of the mosaic or in other words how many groups they can follow and view posts from,” Finch said. “UC Davis is a huge school with many groups. The mosaic allows a student to view hundreds of photos and videos quickly without swiping or tapping for long periods of time.”

Another main function of the app is to help groups gain exposure. This is achieved through a discovery screen which offers three additional platforms to the user. The “suggested groups” tab shows specifically tailored groups to students based on elements of their personal profile information such as major and year. The “categories” tab allows students to sift through different types of college groups such as academic, cultural and Greek, and the promotion tab allows student organizations to have their mosaics prominently featured on users’ feeds on specific days.

The Marble team is constantly looking toward the future of Marble’s long term usability and scope, and hope that the app can become an integral part of UC Davis social and recreational life.

“We’re hoping Marble will become a virtual campus hub and an indispensable tool for every UC Davis student,” Mumford said.

While it remains too early to project Marble’s success in the distant future, many have high hopes.  

“I honestly think Marble will catch on,” Diamant said. “It is essentially free advertising for clubs and a much easier platform for finding clubs compared to anything students had access to in the past. The app also feels and looks great, making it fun to use and see what other people and groups are doing even if you aren’t necessarily searching for a new group to join at the moment.”

Finch and Mumford hope to start spreading the app to other college campuses as well.

“Eventually, I would like to open it to the public and use it as a platform for viewing large amounts of ephemeral photos and photos from events, people and groups around the world,” Finch said. “So for example, you could look up a sporting event or concert and view all the photos and videos taken at the event.”

Mumford believes that Marble has the potential to make it big in the social media world.

“We’re hoping to hit the jackpot with Marble,” Mumford said. “We really believe we’ve got something special. We’re trying to take it slow and steady at the beginning to make sure Marble can grow sustainably without any critical flaws, but we hope to eventually knock Snapchat off their throne. This is a long way out, but it could happen.”

Written by: Eddy Zhu — campus@theaggie.org

Students to discuss issues, activism for Asian Pacific Islander community

The Cross Cultural Center (CCC) will be hosting the Asian American and Pacific Islander Issues Conference (AAPIICON) on April 30 from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. The conference began in 2013 as the Asian Pacific Islander Issues Conference and was held annually except in 2016.

Sabrina Lee, a third-year film studies and community and regional development double major, chose to bring back the conference this year. Lee felt there was a divide between the South Asian, Middle Eastern and Pacific Islander communities and reached out to people across campus who were interested in similar work to help organize the conference.

“I created a committee in Fall Quarter, and they were the driving force for the theme, how things were going to work and the different issues they wanted to talk about,” Lee said.

Lee works as the Asian Pacific Islander Community Coordinator at the CCC. She used the budget from her position to fund the conference and also asked senior and student staff for extra funds. The conference, which will address the different issues faced by the Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) community, will include a panel, six workshops, short educational talks and a keynote speaker. Some workshop topics include media, beauty standards, domestic violence and abuse, mental health, student community activism and settler colonialism. The keynote speaker will be Colin Masashi Ehara, a word artist and community organizer from the Bay Area. Ehara is part Japanese, white and indigenous. Ehara was chosen to address working together in solidarity and the resistance between the communities of people of color along with the conference theme of revolutionary love.  

“The issues that created the current political climate have been alive and well for a long period of time,” Lee said. “Because of the way things are right now, it caused me to change a lot of ways I was planning this conference.”

Lee felt it was important to include the Middle Eastern and South Asian communities in order to create support and solidarity within the Asian and Pacific Islander (API) community. She hopes to start conversations to critically discuss the status and future of the AAPI community.

Jinni Pradhan, a Middle Eastern and South Asian Student Affairs officer, attended UC Davis as a graduate student and attended and hosted a workshop at a previous conference. Pradhan now serves to support and connect Middle Eastern and South Asian students to resources, ensuring that students feel supported through an advisory capacity as well as programming. She is also on the conference committee and assists Lee and her colleagues with logistics, issues addressed at the conference and general programming.

“We need to be talking about ways in which specifically the API community can be more engaged, to see ourselves represented and have issues addressed,” Pradhan said. “Asian Americans are portrayed as a model minority […] but that masks a lot of the actual issues and hurdles that people in our community have to overcome. Not everyone has a lot of privilege or has a lot of access, and I think discussing that and actually talking about the complexity of the API community is really important.”

Pradhan believes it is important to bring the awareness of issues to both people who are and are not a part of the API community. She feels that while students are creating spaces to address API issues and make students feel welcome, there are students who do not feel respected due to diverse backgrounds and the complexity of issues.  

Jade Wolansky, a fourth-year political science and international relations double major, got involved by going to the API leadership retreat in January and becoming interested in API activism. Wolansky felt that a lot of API community programming was not inclusive to adoptees and wanted to give a presence to Asian American adoptees on the UC Davis campus.

“It’s important for people of color to come together in solidarity, and we should be ourselves within the hierarchy that white people have created for us,” Wolansky said.

“History repeats itself and we’re trying to remind people that we’re not so different.”

Heather Nguyen, a fourth-year psychobiology major, learned about the conference through Facebook. Nguyen is on a committee about mental health in the API community and will be holding a workshop to teach about the ways different people express mental health experiences through art. Nguyen feels that not all communities are equally accepted, a belief that stems from her personal experiences. She hopes that people will gain a better understanding of diverse experiences and engage in dialogue that is more healing than hurtful.

“Many communities that fall under API do not feel like one unit,” Nguyen said. “It is important to have an AAPIICON to emphasize similarities in our narratives but also differences that make us unique and challenge the idea that API means everyone is homogenous, because we have very diverse experiences in history.”

Written by: Jayashri Padmanabhan — campus@theaggie.org

Dining Commons to get rid of swipes starting this fall

In an effort to make the Dining Commons (DC) more accommodating to students’ busy schedules, UC Davis will introduce a new meal plan option during Fall Quarter of 2017 that will give students unlimited access to the three DC’s all day.

In July, UC Davis will gravitate away from its 40-year management contract with Sodexo and move toward self-operation of the DC’s. Though students will not see much of a change in the management of the DC, there will be significant changes to the meal plan structure.

The new design offers a seven or five-day plan from either Sunday through Thursday or Monday through Friday. Kraig Brady, the director of Hospitality and Dining Services, said new DC hours will make meal plans more flexible for students.

The DCs will each be open Monday through Thursday from 7 a.m. to midnight and Friday from 7 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. Additionally, Segundo and Tercero will have weekend hours from 9:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Saturdays and 9:30 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Sundays. Cuarto will be open on Saturday from 12 to 7 p.m. and Sunday from 12 to 8 p.m.

These changes cater to student meal time preferences as they won’t be restricted by established serving periods.

“It basically makes our dining facilities like our students’ kitchen at home,” said Brandon Petitt, the director of Student Development. “It allows them to come in and out, grab something from the ‘refrigerator’ and be able to eat [at] any time without what we would perceive to be regular breakfast, lunch and dinner meal times.”

In the past few years, Petitt said the DC management has been working with consultants and student focus groups to review the plans and provide feedback. Though there are no finalized rates yet, the projected meal plan prices for 2017-2018 residence hall students are similar to the price of the 150 swipes plan, but students will automatically be allotted $200 in Aggie Cash. This gives students a greater value for their money since the plan will have unlimited access to the DC.

“Students wanted more flexibility using their Dining Commons, and they didn’t want to be charged for the amount of times that they went, but rather the amount of days that they used the DC,” Brady said via email.

Rather than living an unhealthy lifestyle by stuffing themselves to get their money’s worth, students can simply grab a quick snack or bigger meal at their convenience without being concerned about their swipe balance. Thus, the plan aims to remove the stress of whether students will have enough swipes to get through the quarter.

“It keeps it more casual so [students] can focus more on their studies versus what their meal balances are,” Petitt said.

Brady said faculty as well as incoming, transfer and returning students will be able to purchase a plan. Instead of swipes, students can use Aggie Cash to admit their family or friends to the DC, buy meals at the convenience stores and purchase items from the food trucks. The plan for students in the residence halls will not roll over into sequential quarters; however, students, staff and facility can purchase meal block plans that will roll over until depleted.

Petitt hopes to show parents of prospective students that their kids will be well fed as they can access the DC as frequently as they wish. During non-typical meal hours, Petitt ensured that there will always be hot meals available, and the weekly traffic will be assessed to determine a routine for providing more food items at certain times. Nevertheless, the DC will always have a rotating salad bar, soups, pizza and a specialty item.

Similar to the current rules, students will be permitted to leave the DC with an ice cream cone, baked good, fruit or a filled student housing water bottle. However, the food to go program will no longer exist at the DC.

“The switch really accommodates the student’s lifestyle and supports their eating patterns,” Brady said. “The new model will allow a student to eat lunch when they want to, or come into the DC to grab just a banana or a quick snack before class.”

Stephanie Low, a second-year biology major, attends the DC every day on a 150-swipe plan and intends to switch over to the new plan next year.

“I don’t plan on seeing too many changes,” Low said. “If you find your worth in it, then I guess it [works].”

The 2017-2018 meal plan rates will be reviewed by the UC Regents for approval in May.
Written by: Jeanna Totah — campus@theaggie.org

Events to create dialogue surrounding sexual violence on campus

Throughout April, campus organizations will host events to commemorate Sexual Assault Awareness Month. These events will raise awareness of sexual assault on college campuses, inform students of available resources and get students involved in efforts to make UC Davis a safer campus.

Events planned include the Dear Survivor Photo Project on April 6, a screening of the documentary The Hunting Ground on April 13 and the Take Back the Night event on April 12. These events aim to create a dialogue regarding sexual assault with students on campus.

Sam Alavi, a fourth-year sociology and education major, is the student director of ASUCD’s Sexual Assault, Awareness and Advocacy Committee (SAAAC) and creator of the Dear Survivor Photo Project.

“The campus supports survivors; you’re loved, you’re supported and we believe you,” Alavi said. “It’s a really simple message that a lot of survivors don’t get.”

Over the past few months, Alavi has photographed survivors and allies and overlaid stylized versions of letters written to themselves, friends or other survivors. She plans to post digital versions of these posters online during April and eventually convert them into banners that will hang around campus. On April 6, from 4 to 6 p.m., the Women’s Resources and Research Center (WRRC) will host an event in which students can participate in the project themselves by having their photos taken and writing letters to friends or other survivors.

Lily Karim, a first-year biomedical engineering major and member of the SAAAC, is working to organize a screening of The Hunting Ground with the help of other SAAAC members. The documentary describes the prevalence of rape culture on college campuses across the nation through the stories of survivors. The screening will take place on April 13 at 7:30 p.m. in Sciences Lecture Hall.

“My goal is to raise awareness for sexual assault on campus and the reporting process. It needs to be more transparent so survivors are not silenced,” Karim said.

UC Davis’ Center for Advocacy, Resources, and Education (CARE) is organizing Take Back the Night, which, according to the event’s Facebook page, is “an annual event which aims to raise awareness about sexual assault, support survivors and promote action within the community to end sexual and gender-based violence.” At the Student Community Center on April 12 starting at 7 p.m., students can participate in art projects, listen to spoken word, hear live music and attend a resource fair as a way to support survivors and create a larger community of students informed and committed to ending sexual assault on the UC Davis campus.

CARE Outreach Student Assistant Allyanna Pittman, a fourth-year psychology and economics double major, is working to coordinate the event.

“Our aim is to create a campus culture that is intolerant of sexual assault, while simultaneously empowering survivors,” Pittman said via email.

Resources for students interested in learning more can be found at UC Davis’ Sexual Violence Prevention and Response website, the WRRC and CARE.
Written by: Ally Russell — campus@theaggie.org

Students de-stress before finals

A group of over 100 students congregated on the Quad on March 20 to join together and scream in order to let off steam before their impending Winter Quarter final exams.

The event began as a joke, created by a UC Davis student who runs the UC Davis Memes Facebook page. After almost 2,000 students responded that they would be coming to the event, the creator of the page decided to actually organize it.

Students were encouraged to take a break from studying, bring their own deteriorating mental health, and participate in the event to take their minds off of finals, according to the event’s Facebook page.

“I totally thought it was going to be a joke, I think a lot of people thought that at first,” said Victoria Susman, a second-year wildlife, fish and conservation biology major who attended the event with friends.

Immediately after the event, Susman went back to locking herself in the library’s 24-hour study room.

“It was just nice to let go of so much pent up energy and stress with people who were also equally stressed as you,” Susman said. “Something that really struck me was how friendly everyone was. I think we were all united in a mutual pain of finals week.”

The creator of the UC Davis Memes page usually posts jokes and content uniquely catered to students at UC Davis. Meme topics range from the lack of forks at the Dining Commons to students’ daily, near-death encounters in the bike circles. During the weeks leading up to finals, the creator tailored content to the stress rising around campus as students anxiously prepared for final exams.

The creator of the popular Facebook page hopes these jokes, beyond being occasional distractions for students, can actually bring people together.

“I really want people to be able to laugh about all the crap they have to deal with in school and hopefully through humor feel a bit better about themselves,” said the creator of the memes page, a second-year student who preferred to remain anonymous. “It felt really good to have this community event where we all acknowledged we were suffering during finals and that we were kind of in it together.”

Andrew Kielak, a second-year agricultural business major, attended the event and embraced the humor of being one of more than 100 students gathered together to scream. Kielak was impressed by the number of students who showed up for the event.

“People actually went to an event created by a meme page,” Kielak said.

When asked if the event would continue as a quarterly tradition, Kielak said, “Davis does plenty of weird things already, might as well add one more.”

Behind the scenes of the synchronized screaming heard around the UC Davis campus was second-year animal science major Jamie Burns. Burns worked closely with her friend, the creator of the UC Davis Memes Facebook page, to act as the event’s coordinator.

“In order to keep my friend’s name a secret I tried to help lead the event and get a countdown to scream at the same time,” Burns said. “It was a fun, weird experience and hopefully it remains a quarterly tradition.”

After the successful turnout, Burns looks forward to organizing a Spring Quarter screaming event before finals and hopes the event continues as a new, quirky UC Davis tradition.
Written by: Ally Russell — campus@theaggie.org