When Adena Ishii read a Facebook rant against community college transfers to UC Berkeley, she was determined to set the record straight.
Ishii transferred from Berkeley City College and Moorpark Community College to UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. She’s now Program Coordinator of BCC’s Transfer Service Community, and in an op-ed on Berkeleyside’s Opinionator, she makes a powerful case for the path she and many other students follow to Cal and other UC campuses.
“Transfer students often face overwhelmingly challenging life experiences, and we don’t all have the same opportunities or privileges that are often associated with freshman admits,” writes Ishii.
And when transfer students get to Cal, according to Ishii, their performance measures up to students who entered in freshman year.
“Professors, counselors, and administrators at UC Berkeley constantly tell me how much they love transfer students,” Ishii writes. “They say that we are ridiculously hard working, less entitled than freshman admits, and overflowing with rich life experience that we share in the classroom.”
Incidentally, the (anonymous) Facebook post that provoked Ishii has at time of writing 12 Likes and 18 Shares. Ishii’s op-ed has already been shared more than 2,600 times on Facebook.
What do you think? Read the op-ed and share your thoughts in the comments section there.
Berkeleyside welcomes submissions of op-ed articles. We ask that we are given first refusal to publish. Topics should be Berkeley-related, local authors are preferred, and we don’t publish anonymous pieces. Email submissions, as Word documents or embedded in the email, to editors@berkeleyside.com. The recommended length is 500-800 words. Please include your name and a one-line bio that includes full, relevant disclosures. Berkeleyside will publish op-ed pieces at its discretion.
