“When I grow up, I want to discover a cure for cancer.” As a child, I’ve always dreamed about what I would want to accomplish as an adult. Many of you science majors also grew up with the same dream to “cure” or help someone or something. We’ve all thought about it, and mostly our goals are still the same — although now in a more specialized field. As UC students, we have ambitions to apply what we learn here into a real field and pay off our ridiculous student loans with income from a good job. The real struggle is finding an industry to start our post-college lives with. You have some choices: working for the for-profit private sector, or for non-profit public institutions. I believe any scientist should have the freedom to pursue his or her interests without the pressure to make money, like many for-profit corporations want.

My interest in science arose from my own personal experience with disease. Once getting the diagnosis, I never thought to myself “this is the end” but I saw it as a beginning to a whole new adventure. I saw so much detail and learning about that one disease that I encountered, and I wanted to continue studying it and developing solutions for it throughout my career. I wanted to work in a place that allowed me to take my passion in this area and convert it into useful solutions. As the time to graduate creeps ever closer, it is time for me to choose my future place of work and I see a potential problem with private industry.

What we should question before we accept a job offer is what does this place stand for in the world of science? You’ve got your private (for-profit) industry (Roche, Pfizer, Bio-Rad, etc.), and you also have places like our very own UC Davis (public or non-profit institutions). The vision that these different industries have is the same: to produce new and innovative material relating to public health and technology. My concern is not what is produced, but ultimately why.

It’s not a complex motive — private industry works for profit. It will pursue an opportunity that provides a greater return on the investment put in by the company. A problem arises when your interest does not match with the company’s profit interest. Working in this industry can divert your attention to developing materials or research that produce revenue for the company, but may not be something that necessarily helps the situation it tries to solve. You can look at anti-biotics as a fitting example. Industry makes tons of profits from these, yet is very slow to develop the technology to fight infections effectively. If you head over to my previous “Bacteria talk” entry, you’ll see exactly why.

When deciding where to work in your future as a scientist, I would suggest you look at the non-profit companies and institutions as a possible choice. You are not working towards revenue increase at these places; your goal is making a case for your interest — and how it can be a benefit to society. You have breathing room to develop your idea and not be rushed to produce a result that maximizes on money. Best of all, you work with people who share your passion for research and can help make your idea a solution that will contribute to the world.

Students choosing non-profits can send a strong signal that we conduct research for the betterment of society, and not solely for profits. Freshmen or super senior, you can find your specific passion in research (science or not) right here on campus. Visit the Undergraduate Research Center (urc.ucdavis.edu) to learn how to get your own research started.

Burn the tip of your tongue with some hot chocolate while speaking passionately about this with UMAYR SUFI at the CoHo. Or just email (uwsufi@ucdavis.edu) and tweet (@umayrsufi)

Earlier this year in May, an associate professor of feminist studies at UC Santa Barbara removed anti-abortion signs from protesters, took them to her office and destroyed them. According to an article in the Santa Barbara Independent, she said she was “triggered” and offended by the imagery on the posters and felt that the protestors had no right to be there. Earlier this month, in Montclair State University in New Jersey, a pro-Palestinian student organization passed out pamphlets but was fined because of a complaint and told they were not allowed to take political stances. This decision was reversed later. In June, a student at University of Oregon was charged with conduct violations, including harassment, when she shouted, “I hit it first!” out of a window in her dorm. In April, students tried putting up a Free Speech wall at Loyola University Chicago, but were told it had to be censored due to offensive material or material that went against the university’s principles. This month, UC Berkeley will celebrate its 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, but some critics, such as the organization Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), say that UC Berkeley, like many other universities across the United States, only protect freedom of speech for certain ideologies, while labeling other ideologies as offensive.

Many universities, including UC Davis, have for the past several years focused on trying to be more inclusive, to foster a more diverse student body and to engineer a more accepting tomorrow for various groups of people that have previously excluded or ignored groups of people in higher education. Early on, it was noted that certain attitudes and language use were shown to be hostile toward this more inclusive environment, so efforts were made to make it more welcoming. Yet ironically, being diverse means having many people of various groups come together, and sometimes these groups, such as those divided along ideological, religious or political lines, have trouble getting along or are inherently antagonistic.

On Aug. 30, UC Davis adopted a new campus climate policy on freedom of expression in Chapter 400 of the UC Davis Policy and Procedure Manual. It recognized the right for students to express opinionated dissent and the importance of freedom of expression on campus. UC Davis also has many policies promoting campus safety in terms of inclusivity on campus. Will these two policies clash? Well, as the examples I provided above suggest, they eventually will.  Perhaps it is a sadly unavoidable consequence when trying to balance freedom of speech and freedom of social safety. Something that complicates this more is that there is a lot of room for subjectivity; a crude joke that humors a specific person of a specific minority group may offend another person of that same group or even a majority group member. There will be many people who will try to speak for everyone in their identity group by saying why a certain thing offends them, but they will neglect the ones who are not offended. And there will be people in these groups who are not offended initially until it is explained to them why they should be offended. There are people who view offense on a spectrum, and those who view it in black and white.

I am slightly older than most people on campus. I was in middle and high school in the early 2000s, during the first four years George W. Bush administration, and I paid attention to politics and current events at that age. A common concern during the early Bush years and even later into his administration was censorship, especially in relation to the Patriot Act. Many progressives, like me, were very concerned about what a conservative dominance may mean for freedom of speech. We were concerned about a conservative reign of terror that would persecute certain people in the name of counter-terrorism and label certain groups as “anti-American” in the same vein as the Red Scare.

Now I am looking at the newer folks in progressive activism, and what I see is beginning to concern me. Have we lost our commitment to frowning upon censorship? Where the line is drawn between the two competing needs is one that is extremely subjective and contestable, making the suggestion by one person alone not very valuable.

KATHERINE LIU can be reached at katliu@ucdavis.edu.

I did not choose to live in Davis. I chose to go to the University of California, Davis. There is a difference. I was making my choice solely based off of an institution and I did not take into consideration other factors such as number of farmers markets or proximity to the beach. I did not even visit Davis before accepting my admittance, which I guess reflects some level of apathy considering that I would be here for the next four years. But after being here for two years, I can say that I fully appreciate the beauty of Davis — for its bike culture, its support of freeform radio and small college-town charm. In two years, when I graduate, I plan on putting a little bit more thought into where I move since I do not want to rely on luck and things just working out again. The idea of staying in Davis seems unattractive to me just because I do not think I will be able to find a job that fills my pockets as deep as I want them. In two years I cannot solely base my decision off the fact that there’s a highly renowned public university here (or I could, but that would be weird), I have to go shopping for things such as “mating markets” and “job markets.”

We tend to think that there are two important decisions we make in life: there is what you do and who you marry, but many people do not take into consideration that where you live plays a big role in your general satisfaction. There is this idea that as the economy becomes more globalized, where we live matters less because we can telecommute to anything; in actuality, place matters more because people are concentrating in clusters. Clusters are geographic spaces where the intellectuals of the nation that innovate tend to congregate. The effect of clustering is positive in the sense that it brings innovative minds together and they can benefit from synergistic effects, such as having multiple job options in the same field because they are all concentrated in one area. One drawback is that it limits the amount of choice people have in terms of where they move. Instead of being able to move anywhere you want after graduating, you are probably going to take into consideration where you will be able to find a job in your field. This concern was not present thirty years ago, when there was no such thing as, for example, a concentration of computer engineers (also known as the Silicon Valley).

Richard Florida wrote about the phenomenon of clusters in his book Who’s Your City? where he traces where the best place for everything is: the best place for singles, the best place for gays and lesbians, etc. If there’s a community you are trying to find, chances are Florida has pinpointed where you should go. An extension of his book is an online forum called “Who’s Your City” where people post testimonials about where they live or ask for community feedback about particular cities they are considering moving to. After a few minutes of reading testimonials I learned that Birmingham, Alabama is getting its groove back (shoutout to Birmingham, keep up the good work) and that TJ Miller’s song “Denver” is probably accurate in terms of city pride.

I want to start a conversation about what it is going to take for people to start answering “Sacramento” when they are asked “Who’s your city?” One issue city planners are trying to address is that graduates of UC Davis are not staying in the region. They are taking their human capital elsewhere, most likely because there is a lack of easy public transportation and because people living here have been unable to establish professional ties in the region. Perhaps Sacramento needs to establish a cluster of its own, potentially using the fact that it is the capital of our state and there is a lot of political power in the area. All I know is that in two years when I weigh the pros and cons of each city, it is going to take more than a few good coffee shops to hold my interest. Can Sacramento rise to the challenge?

If you want to make a song in the style of TJ Miller, but instead as an ode to Davis, you can contact NICOLE NELSON at nsnelson@ucdavis.edu to start brainstorming song lyrics (and costume choice).