by Amanuel Zeryihun

These past ten weeks have been one of the fastest moments of time in my entire life. The theme of this past quarter in my second quarter of my first year in college at UCSC has been productivity, efficiency, and relentlessness. The quarter began similar to my first day at school in the fall; however, the gears switched quickly and the speed of my days and weeks were surpassing the sound barrier before I knew it. In the first week of school, I and two upperclassmen regenerated a club on our campus that had been lifeless for years. In the coming ten weeks, we had already held nine meetings for the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE: of which I am the Vice-President) that attracted at least ten people a meeting. In the meantime, I was managing holding exceptional grades in my Physics, Calculus, and Computer Programming classes and formally declaring my major as Electrical Engineering. These classes are all engineering classes and as you can imagine they are very intensive and fast-paced and require extreme care and hard work. In the midst of these two major commitments, I managed to attend a weekend church conference in Oakland where I met some of the most amazing, intelligent, and interesting people from colleges such as Stanford, UC Berkeley, and UC Davis. Along with the latter, I found myself attending a heated emergency Black Campus meeting one Sunday night that was held in response to extremely racist actions that occurred on the UC San Diego campus. The meeting was centered on taking action and our final decision was protesting against the campus at UCSD, UCSC, and the entire UC System for allowing many injustices to occur on our campuses. I can honestly say that being in that three hour long meeting made me appreciate the opportunity that I have to be in college and participate in such perspective-altering and motivating events. The following Thursday we all duct taped our mouths in protest of the lack of diversity on our campus. My duct tape read “2.6%”, which referred to the number of African Americans on our campus. I was met with odd stares that made me feel somewhat embarrassed and uneasy, but mainly triumphant for gaining the attention of my peers through an issue which I believe needs to be brought to light. In just these past three weeks, I and some of the residences of my dorm and NSBE coordinated a dance for Black History Month that raised money for The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. Over one hundred people showed up to the dance. NSBE would soon come knocking on the door for my attention and I had no choice but to answer. After inviting the Dean of Affairs in our Engineering department to one of our NSBE meetings, we were informed that there will be a national conference in Toronto, Canada from March 31,2010 to April 4,2010 for members of NSBE. I was told by almost all of my peers and most of the staff that raising money was out of the question because of the limited time that we had. I quickly gathered the leaders of NSBE and assigned each of them essay questions to complete for the Funding Request Forms from various sources on our Campus. After about one month of coordinating, essay writing, meeting with higher staff, and budget analyzing, I found myself speaking in front of sixty people at a Student Union Assembly meeting seeking their support in our efforts to go to Canada. Shortly after leaving the meeting that night, I was told that we had been granted our full request of $1,600. This news was all the more exciting because I had just been informed by that morning by various sources that I had contacted that we had been granted our requests from them as well. That night we had received our full funding of $4,200. I would soon come to find out in the coming days that I had also received the Resident Advisor job for my dorm for the next year which will fully pay my room and board payments for the year. The application process was tedious and required waking up early in the morning to attend group and individual interviews but all of the hard work was apt to pay off.

Although my days have been fuzzy blurs of work and hectic time schedules and chaos, I can comfortably say that I kept a very clear and peaceful mind while managing all of my responsibilities. There has never been a time in my life where I have been using my time so productively and wisely. I remember the days that went by in high school that left me unmotivated and uneasy about my future, but being in college and finding so much to do and so much to be a part of has made me feel so rejuvenated and ready to take on life and succeed. There is nothing that I would rather do than make the most of my days – I feel like I’ve been doing a decent job.

Thanks 826 Family for making all of this possible,

Love Amanuel Zeryihun