Andra Lim: Seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary

I was voted the Daily Bruin’s most anal retentive staffer at the end of this year. I would be a bit offended, if the title didn’t so obviously suit me. Part of my job is worrying about small things like headline space, whether to say “more” or “over,” where a certain paragraph should be placed […]

Graduating UCLA student balanced classes, financially supported her family

For an assignment in her high school literature class, Victoria Gonzalez and her classmates wrote essays about their struggles at home because of the economic downturn in 2008. The class turned the essays into a YouTube video that received thousands of views and national recognition. In the video they asked viewers: “Is Anybody Listening?” In […]

Submission: Past successes serve as foundation for future endeavors

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 […]

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 […]