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International students attend Berkeley summer sessions

BERKELEY, Calif. — Every summer, UC Berkeley students leave campus to visit hometowns, travel and work summer jobs. As they leave, undergraduate and graduate students coming from all over the world take their places on campus to participate in summer study sessions administered by the university.

Berkeley Summer Sessions offer international students an opportunity to learn at a well-regarded educational institution — UC Berkeley was ranked the No. 1 public university in the country by US News in 2018 — alongside intelligent, like-minded people from every corner of the globe.

Morten Fels and Liu Peng are both participants in the political science session. Fels, a 25-year-old from Denmark working on his master’s at the University of Copenhagen, and Peng, a 23-year-old working on his master’s at Peking University in Beijing, have become good friends despite coming from completely different places.

“Even though you’re from China _ totally different political system than we have in Denmark — we still actually think very much the same way,” Fels said to Peng.

Hyeonjoo Seo is an international student from South Korea taking summer courses in psychology and statistics at Berkeley.

Berkeley summer sessions also allow students to pursue interests unrelated to their majors. Hyeonjoo Seo is a 19-year-old chemistry major studying at Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology in South Korea.

“My university doesn’t give us too many different fields, so I wanted to take different classes at UC Berkeley,” Seo said. “I’m a major in chemistry but I wanted to study statistics, mathematics, and biology or psychology.”

A high percentage of international students are Chinese, and almost every country imaginable is represented at the summer sessions. Seo has met people from China, Japan, France, Korea, Italy and more.

Gene Guo, a 20-year-old from China studying electrical engineering, appreciates the wide-ranging backgrounds of Berkeley summer students.

“Here you can make friends with people from all over the world,” he said.

Fels also enjoys how diverse students studying in summer sessions at Berkeley are.

“You really get to meet a lot of people from throughout the world. That’s amazing, that’s very unique,” he said.

From bottom left to top right: Bill Yuan, Samuel Tseng, Gene Guo

Though roughly 3,000 international students study at Berkeley in the summer, being given the opportunity to do so is not easy. International applicants have to demonstrate a proficiency in English, and their grades and test scores often have to meet certain requirements. Guo, Samuel Tseng and Bill Yuan, all of whom are from China, had to be in the top 20 percent of their classes to apply to their sessions.

Once students arrive at Berkeley, they have to get to work. While classes do not typically exceed three hours in length, many students attend multiple sessions, and the homework load can be heavy.

“Six weeks is not a lot, so it’s quite intensive,” Fels said. “We have a lot of stuff to do.”

Being a student in a foreign country can be a useful, formative and eye-opening experience, but it does not come without challenges. The language barrier, in particular, can be difficult to navigate. Peng and Seo agree that speaking English has been the toughest obstacle they have faced at Berkeley.

Other troubles include having to use different types of toilets than those at home and not having much to do at night in dorms. On the whole, however, the experiences of international students attending Berkeley summer sessions are positive and constructive.

Even though they have had varying experiences while staying at Berkeley, Fels, Peng, Guo, Tseng, Yuan and Seo all agree that coming to Berkeley to study during the summer was a good decision.

“It was worth it,” Seo said.  

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Berkeley Farmers’ Market strives to make healthy food affordable

BERKELEY, Calif. — For more than 10 years, the Berkeley Farmers’ Market has been at the forefront of a statewide effort to facilitate purchases of healthy, affordable food for those who struggle financially. Berkeley farmers’ markets are among the most affordable in the Bay Area because they accept electronic benefit transfer (EBT) cards and are participants in California’s Market Match program.

EBT cards are magnetically encoded, just like debit and credit cards. Recipients of federal welfare aid have their benefits stored in EBT cards, which can be used to buy food at stores. Some farmers’ markets, like the Berkeley Farmers’ Market, accept EBT cards.

Berkeley Farmers’ Markets began accepting EBT cards as valid forms of payment in 2008. Though they had previously accepted paper food stamps, scanning a magnetic stripe card presented a new set of challenges. To this day, most vendors at farmers’ markets have no way to scan cards and accept payments. The solution to the problem involves a token system through which money is transferred from a card holder’s EBT account to special coins worth $1 each that can be spent on certain farmers’ market products.

Thanks to the Market Match program — a program funded by a national grant designed to incentivize healthy eating — EBT card-holding shoppers are matched dollar for dollar for any amount of money they spend off of their cards up to $10. Therefore, in addition to EBT tokens, shoppers can receive up to 10 Market Match tokens to spend every time they visit a Berkeley farmers’ market.

Because  the Ecology Center, which administers Berkeley’s farmer’s markets, holds three weekly markets, card holders can receive up to $30 from the Market Match program every week without leaving Berkeley.

Paras Maharjan, a produce vendor from Riverdog Farm in Guinda, Calif., estimates that 15-20 percent of Riverdog customers pay with EBT or Market Match tokens.

“I think it’s a great program,” he said. “I think that they could maybe increase the amount of the Market Match to $15 or $20.”

There are some stipulations to the way EBT and Market Match tokens can be spent, though. EBT tokens can be used to purchase any food product except for hot prepared foods, and Market Match tokens can only be used to buy fresh produce.

Paul Stone, a Berkeley Farmers’ Market manager who has been working with the Ecology Center for more than 20 years, understands that the goal of the Market Match program is to encourage people to eat healthy, and therefore does not have many problems with ways the tokens can be spent. Though he would like to see the spending capabilities of Market Match tokens expanded to nuts and dried fruit, he is generally a proponent of both EBT and Market Match programs at farmers’ markets.

EBT and Market Match coins can be used to purchase fresh produce and herbs (Photo by Caden Thun).

“I’m sure I would make some tweaks but I understand why there are restrictions,” he said. “The whole reason we do this is to get great, healthy food to the public.”