When looking at history, we can see the power of the student voice, and how it is harnessed in the Undergraduate Students Association Council. We look to the Freedom Riders of the 1960s as an example of UCLA students being heard on a national level. Or the movement to divest from South African apartheid in […]
Category Archives: Opinion Columns
James Barragan: A dedication to legacy, future
I wrote the personal essay to my college applications about the Wu-Tang Clan’s song “C.R.E.A.M.”
It’s a song about growing up in rough neighborhoods, dealing with gang violence and drugs and thinking that money is the only way out. That song summed up the way many of the kids in my high school seemed to think.
But I wanted something different. I wanted to get an education and change the world.
Serli Polatoglu: Chance saved by dignity
Three years is an oddly indefinable period of time. Some days, my stint at UCLA seemed interminable. Some days, it seemed all too transitory. And now, as I sit here typing up the text that will bear my very last byline in the Daily Bruin, I can’t help but realize that both sentiments, opposing as […]
Ryan Menezes: Sports reporting, statistics studies are suprising duo
There isn’t an algorithm in this world that will piece together a proper work of journalism. It took me some time to understand that when my career as an amateur reporter began. And when I did, I thought my interests sat on different ends of a spectrum, or at least on different halves of the […]
Kylie Reynolds: Stacks of newspapers, stacks of memories
I’ve left stacks of Daily Bruin papers throughout the country. Some reside in my mom’s house in Ohio. Others are scattered in drawers at my grandparents’ home in Riverside, Calif. And a significant chunk sit in my Kelton apartment closet. It’s true – I’m a pack rat. I have a penchant for holding onto trinkets, […]
Angelica Lai: Magic, passion prevail
There’s something sad and magical about lasts – whether it’s the last page of a 300-page book, the last time your roommate lets you use the kitchen unsupervised or, as in my case, the last shift you have as a Daily Bruin copy editor. While holding a freshly printed copy of a finished page to […]
Submission: Retiring professor encourages critical, independent thought
I have regarded my time at UCLA a great privilege, both because of the high intellectual quality of the students who have chosen to take my courses and because of the stimulation from serving with such extraordinary scholars in the department of history and other departments on campus. I have been honored by invitations to […]