Three Houses, One Home

By Jeffrey Nash · On March 21, 2014

Being a Berkeley student from the East Bay is a unique, weird, yet beneficial situation. I was born at Alta Bates in Berkeley, and my parents moved to Walnut Creek when I was a year old. I didn’t go to Berkeley much until my junior year of high school, but it seemed to be everything exciting, unlike the suburbs. Still, when it came time to apply to colleges, I had pretty much written off UC Berkeley for two reasons: I wanted to be an engineer and I figured I had a slim chance of getting into a school as prestigious as Berkeley, and I had this fixation on doing the college thing all by myself. I love my parents and family, but I assumed that being that close might put a damper on my independence.

After looking at schools, I became enamored with UC Davis. It seemed like a great school and my parents — both of whom went there for grad school — were absolutely supportive. I remember being nervous about applying. I was so dead set on Davis that I only applied to four schools — all UCs — with the intent of doing two years at a community college should I not get into any of my choices. I almost ignored a supplemental application request from Berkeley. When decisions started rolling in, I remember feeling a sigh of relief when I heard from my first school. Davis’s decision day grew nearer.

One day late in March, I got an email in my inbox.

I got in. Not only did I get in, but I got their Regents’ scholarship. I was ecstatic. My hard work had paid off and I had gotten everything that (I thought) I wanted and more. I was about to sign the SIR right then and there when my mother told me to wait for decisions from Berkeley and UCLA later that month. I’m glad I did. At the very end of March, Berkeley emailed me. No Regents’ or anything special like my beloved Davis, but I got in. I figured I’d go to one more admitted students’ day, and, looking back on it, I am so thankful that I did that as well.

It was a sunny April afternoon. After a nice lunch by the Campanile, I began my tour of Berkeley’s facilities. I started out with a fixed attitude — this was just to pay lip service to a school that accepted me and nothing more, I told myself. However, with each word that came out of our tour guide’s mouth and each building, room, and landmark my eye beheld, I knew that this was the school for me. Knowing it would be 15,000 dollars per year more expensive, my parents and I looked one another in the eye at the end of Cal Day and I said, “I’m going here.” I submitted my SIR after a day of thought, and that was that.

A nice casual stroll!

Still, I was apprehensive about being so close. Being a civil engineer major, I Google mapped just how close I was. Taking the absolute shortest route, I was less than 12 miles from home. If I were to walk, it would take me 4 hours and 10 minutes. Too long to walk, sure, but compared to Davis’s 20 hours and 26 minutes, this was a mere walk around the block! I thought of all my friends who lived in Berkeley. I loved them, but wasn’t college about starting over and meeting new people?

After one and a half semesters, I can say that at Berkeley I have been able to meet new people, discover more about myself, learn, and, most importantly, thrive. I get all that with the added benefit of being able to call my parents to pick me up and take me to dinner. I can BART home after a particularly stressful week. I truly do have the best of both worlds in Berkeley.

Between my mom’s house, my dad’s house, and Unit 3, I like to brag that I have three places to rest my head on any given day. But even with an abnormal house to net worth ratio, I have only one home: the Bay Area. And if that means I have to go to the dentist on a Saturday morning, so be it. But, all dental matters aside, independence is a weird thing that cannot be measured in miles, number of conversations, or continuous time spent away. At the beginning of the year, I’d find myself fighting the urge to go home because I felt that each day crossed off on a calendar that I didn’t go home was some sort of addition to my independence. That’s not the case. Whether you hail from Berkeley or Bangladesh, you will gain a sense of independence in college — no questions asked.

Don’t stress the fact that your house happens to be geographically closer than most, for the college environment is distinct from anything you’ve ever experienced. You will learn all sorts of new things about yourself, meet all sorts of new people, and form new friendships for years to come, just like everybody else. Being a local and going to college in Berkeley is sort of like going to the train station that Harry Potter went to in the first movie. Sather Gate is your very own Platform 9 and 3/4 – a portal into a world that, despite being so close to the world you’ve always known, is full of new experience, adventure, and magic.