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Tag: Berkeley

  • Malia Obama: Stanford or Berkeley Bound?

    Malia Obama: Stanford or Berkeley Bound?

    Malia Obama has reached that pivotal point in most teenager’s lives when it’s time to seriously consider the colleges to which she’ll apply. The 16-year-old daughter of President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama will head off to college in the fall of 2016.

    President Obama has said in the past that Malia wants to be a filmmaker. The media reported last summer that Malia Obama toured two northern California rivals–both Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley.

    Berkeley, of course, is California’s flagship public university. It is known as a liberal enclave. It also has an internationally renown department of film and media.

    Stanford is a private university in Palo Alto, and is a far more conservative school. Chelsea Clinton and some Supreme Court justices including Sandra Day O’Connor graduated from there. At Stanford, students can major or minor in film and media studies. The university has more NCAA championships than any other U.S. school. Malia Obama is known as an athlete, excelling at tennis, so she might be a good fit for “Nerd Nation.” That’s the unofficial nickname for Stanford’s sports fans.

    Malia Obama certainly has a wealth of fodder for her college essay. She’s lived in the White House since she was just 10 years old, and that alone must be an education of sorts. She’s had a front-row seat to her father’s two presidential campaigns. She has traveled around the world, and met world figures such as Queen Elizabeth, Nelson Mandela and Malala Yousafzai.

    Malia Obama’s parents are Harvard-educated lawyers with Ivy League undergraduate degrees–the president’s from Columbia and Michelle Obama’s from Princeton. That said, expectations for Malia undoubtedly run high.

    David Hawkins is an official at the National Association for College Admission Counseling in Arlington, Virginia. What did he have to say about Malia Obama with regard to her college applications?

    “Given the educational attainment of her parents, which is exceptional in itself, I can only assume she is going to be a bright and well-qualified student,” he said.

    What do you predict? Will Malia Obama be heading to Stanford or to Berkeley? Or might she surprise everyone and head somewhere completely unexpected?

  • Obama Nominates Yellen To Fed Chief Position

    President Obama will nominate the Vice Chair of the Federal Reserve, Janet Yellen, to fill Ben Bernanke’s position as chairman of the nation’s central bank when Bernanke’s term ends on January 31st. The fact that Janet will be the first woman to head the organization especially in the middle of the present economic climate is being widely discussed and, in many cases, enthusiastically promoted.

    The Head of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, Senator Tim Johnson, D-S.D., recently praised Professor Yellen’s skill and knowledge.

    “She has a depth of experience that is second to none, and I have no doubt she will be an excellent Federal Reserve chairman,” Senator Johnson said.

    Others have taken to Twitter in order to vocalize support for the sixty-seven-year-old University of California, Berkeley, professor.

    She has an impressive CV including serving as the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco as well as her time teaching at the University of California, Berkeley. The following video gives a brief overview about her political viability for the newly appointed role in which she finds herself.

    In December 2007, Janet Yellen spoke about the important task banks faced to encourage financial growth in spite of reservations and hesitations.

    “If banks only partially replace the collapsed shadow banks or, worse, if they cut back their lending in anticipation of a worsening economy, then the resulting credit crunch could push us into recession. Thus, the risk of recession no longer seems remote, especially since the economy may well already have begun contracting in the current quarter,” Janet Yellen said.

    Her past expertise during the near financial breakdown of 2008 was instrumental in seeing the country through that difficult period. Her anticipated efforts to continue striving to lower unemployment and encourage economic growth will be critical for the nation’s future.

    The following video shows Janet Yellen speaking at the Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley, where her focus on “communication” serves as the crux in ensuring that “monetary policy” is sustainable.

    [Image Via Wikimedia Commons/ Courtesy of U.S. Government And Serves As The Official FRBSF Picture For Janet Yellen]

  • UC Berkeley Explosion Leaves 4 with Minor Burns

    The LA Times reported yesterday that an explosion devastated UC Berkeley’s campus, sending four to the hospital with burns. The main campus was evacuated as a precaution.

    “It was dark. It was pretty scary. We just wanted to get out of there,” one student, sophomore Jesse Kay, said. Another student, 19-year-old Jay Reddy, was in electrical engineering class when the power went out. “We had to figure out how to get out of the building,” he said.

    When the outage happened around 6:30 pm on Monday evening, a campus staff member and several students reported hearing a boom and seeing flames as several buildings lost power. 20 people needed to be rescued from elevators in the affected building.

    Twitter was abuzz with reactions and images of the incident:

    Officials have stated that they believe the power outage is related to a recently discovered vandalism: an off-campus electrical station saw its copper wiring ripped out.

    Dan Mogulof, the spokesman for UC Berkeley, said to reporters “We have a strong suspicion that what happened is related to vandalism discovered last week. The damage they caused may have been far more extensive than we originally thought.”

    The blast area was apparently two stories high, two road lanes wide, and sent at least one manhole cover flying. The explosion happened as engineers were attempting to restore power.

    “Something happened here that surprised the expert… Somebody attacked our system. Somebody stole key parts of our system,” Mogulof continued. “[Classes] aren’t going to happen and people aren’t going to come back here until we’re sure we have a safe situation.”

    [Image via Twitter]