Prime Spring 2022

from the daily bruin

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na rean

Diaz

What powers UCLA? written by Emily Kim

Humans of Starbucks written by Devon Whalen

SPRING 2022

letter from the editors Dear reader, Welcome to the end of the first on-campus spring quarter since 2019. With many of our writers finally finishing their first full year in Westwood, they’re delving into stories beyond UCLA grounds.

Many businesses call Westwood home, and for this issue, our team set out to explore three of them. On the corner of Westwood Boulevard and Kinross Avenue sits Aahs! The Ultimate Gift Store, an eclectic shop with a storied history. But for customers seeking a late-night bite, Hangry Moon’s has the solution: fried chicken with a heaping side of family. Only a block away, PRIME writer Devon Whalen tells the stories of the patrons of one iconic coffee shop in “Humans of Starbucks.”

Back on campus, another new business venture has taken flight this year – Starship robots that deliver food right to customer’s feet. Though the small vehicles may seem unassuming at first, PRIME’s latest comic imagines their potential to take over the world.

Above the ground and in the sky, PRIME writer Breanna Diaz immerses herself in the world of Cirque de ’LA. As UCLA’s first and only circus club, the group provides an environment for students to take their artistic passions to new heights.

As the school year comes to a close, we hope you enjoy learning a little more about UCLA and its surrounding community. Thank you for picking up a copy for PRIME’s spring issue, and we’ll see you again soon.

Emily Dembinski PRIME art director

Abigail Siatkowski PRIME content editor

Justin Huwe PRIME director

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PRIME CONTENTS | SPRING 2022 on the cover photographed by TONY MARTINEZ photo illustrated by EMILY DEMBINSKI

SCIENCE

6 What powers UCLA? written by EMILY KIM

FEATURE

16 Up in the air

written by BREANNA DIAZ

BUSINESS

11 Behind the Aahs curtain

written by ALYSSA BARDUGON

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COMIC

22 The Starship Invasion created by MEGAN FU

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PRIME

CONTENTS

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SPRING 2022

HEALTH

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On the field, off the field written by DYLAN TZUNG

CAMPUS

26 Staying in STEM?

written by KATE GREEN and RACHEL ROTHSCHILD

FEATURE

41 Humans of Starbucks written by DEVON WHALEN

¡

BUSINESS

31 Family style

written by ESTHER MYERS

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written by EMILY KIM illustrated by KIMI JUNG designed by ANNIE BOU

U

pon first arriving at UCLA, the towering, steam-shrouded building near the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center invited much speculation among my friends and I, particularly because of the ever-present clouds of steam or smoke that hung over it.

Was it a factory of some sort? An incinerator? The world’s largest hot tub?

It would prove to be none of those. The 200,000 square foot building houses a variety of UCLA Facilities Management operations – including the UCLA cogeneration plant. Formally known as the Energy System Facility, the plant produces heat and power simultaneously through the process of cogeneration, said Lewis Rosman, the director of energy services, in an emailed statement. The electricity created serves many of UCLA’s facilities.

Inside, it’s hot. It’s loud. And with good reason: “You’re basically operating a large jet engine that has been strapped to the ground,”explained Eric Fournier, research director at the California Center for Sustainable Communities within the UCLA Institute of the Environment & Sustainability.

An impressive number and diversity of pipes – a description also courtesy of Fournier – line the inside of the facility, as do support structures for seismic stability.

From the outside, an enigma. From the inside, pipes, and lots of them. The question remains: What exactly is the UCLA cogeneration plant?

A look back

The plant has its origins in the 1980s. At the time, the campus’ aging utilities infrastructure necessitated frequent repairs, which interrupted teaching and research, and stricter air quality standards demanded a change in the inefficient existing machinery. As operational costs rose and the campus planned to grow, a more efficient system became necessary, according to articlesv provided by UCLA. The new plant’s purpose was to provide reliable power, heating and cooling to UCLA with an increase in efficiency and a reduction in cost and emissions, Rosman said.

Documents show the site was prepared in 1991, and after about 2 1/2 years of construction, the plant began operating in January 1994. But its construction encountered difficulties. Pipeline and concrete progress was postponed by extreme rainfall, while a crane was required to lift the heat-recovery steam generator in seven pieces – each weighing 100,000 pounds – before the rest of the plant was built around it. Still, the plant demonstrated its dependability by continuing to provide power during the Northridge Earthquake in January 1994, even though it was incomplete at the time.

Architects described the building as being designed not to conceal its purpose, despite being situated unusually in an urban area – a technique called “boss design” by its architect Wes Jones. Westwood homeowners, who denounced the plant as an “ugly monstrosity,” were shocked to see it win several architectural honors, according to the Los Angeles Times.

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“Boss design” aside, the technological processes the plant performed were even more complex.

“The cogen plant is really very, very, very advanced in terms of its ability to extract useful energy from the fuel that it’s burning,” Fournier said. “Not necessarily the most advanced – you could argue that there are other things that could be done.

But certainly for 1994, at the time it was built, it’s definitely really cutting edge.”

How it works Three things immediately stood out to Luke Elissiry when he first toured the cogeneration plant: the thundering jet engines, the rooms packed with steam-generating devices and the steam shrouding the cooling towers on the roof in an omnipresent fog.

Elissiry, a UCLA alumnus who studied chemistry, toured the plant as a former officer of the Student Members of the American Chemical Society to study environmentally friendly electricity production through the more energy-efficient process of cogeneration. While the outside of the plant was relatively quiet, the inside was surprisingly noisy, Elissiry said.

“It was really loud in the facility. We had headphones and earplugs, and I think we were wearing hard hats,” Elissiry said.

“Oh yeah,” he later remembered, “We had glasses too.”

According to Rosman, two engines produce electricity by burning natural gas. This process creates an excess of heat energy, which

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is directed to devices that use the energy to create steam with water. After the steam is formed, it can be used for one of three purposes: producing more electricity, heating campus or making cooled water.

All together, the plant can generate 42 megawatts of electricity, 26,000 tons of chilled water and 180,000 pounds of steam per hour, Rosman said. Furthermore, in addition to reducing emissions – which Rosman said would be more than 60% higher using only electricity purchased from the LA power grid – the cogeneration plant lowers operating costs by approximately $50 million each year.

“What surprised me is the scale,” Elissiry said. “I thought, ‘Oh, it’s like one turbine inside that makes a little bit of steam,’ but it’s a really large scale operation.”

A web of underground pipes carries chilled water and steam across campus grounds, Rosman said.

When air blows over the steam pipes, it collects heat and is used to warm university buildings. Chilled water pipes absorb heat from the air, which cools the buildings, before the now-warm water is diverted back to the plant to be chilled again.

“UCLA is able to run a very advanced and efficient plant because they have total control over the integration of that plant with the buildings,” Fournier said. “UCLA, because it has total control of all of that, is able to build a plant that is far more advanced than you would see just out in the world.”

Originally, the plant could fulfill the energy needs of the entire UCLA campus, said Nurit Katz, chief sustainability officer at UCLA, in an emailed statement. However, as the campus has grown, the plant has struggled to meet the increase in demand.

According to the UCLA Facilities Management website, the plant can now only provide enough electrical power for 85% of UCLA’s needs. The rest of the power demand is met by energy purchased from the LA Department of Water and Power.

The plant is struggling to keep up with campus energy requirements, raising questions about its sustainability.

In the name of sustainability – but it’s complicated “The cogeneration plant has been both the single largest contributor to reducing UCLA’s emissions, and at the same remains the largest source of direct emissions,” Katz said.

Presently, the cogeneration plant runs on fossil fuels. Although UCLA’s cogeneration plant can use renewable natural gas – also known as biogas – as its fuel source, Katz said the plant currently uses non-renewable natural gas because of biogas supply shortages.

According to Fournier, nonrenewable natural gas is not totally clean. It still produces significant quantities of pollutants, such as nitrogen oxides, carbon dioxide and fine particulate matter – which can lead to adverse health outcomes, including death, for sensitive populations.

“Moving forward, biogas remains challenging to source and expensive, and an alternative to the cogeneration plant that would meet the needs of the campus has not yet been developed,” Katz said. “An alternative will be highly complex and will require enormous investment.”

Despite the emissions produced by natural gas, the plant is prized for its efficiency.

According to Rosman, UCLA’s cogeneration plant is actually a trigeneration plant because it produces both steam and chilled water in addition to electricity. UCLA’s plant is twice as efficient as most power plants, Katz said.

“In sustainable systems, waste equals food,” Katz added. “That is, the waste from one process is fuel

The cogeneration plant has been both the single largest contributor to reducing UCLA’s emissions, and at the same remains the largest source of direct emissions. for another. Cogeneration is more sustainable than traditional power production because it uses this principle of taking the waste heat from one process and putting it to use.”

So how sustainable is the cogeneration plant really?

Fournier’s answer: “It depends what you’re comparing it to.”

The benefit of a cogeneration plant over a conventional natural gas plant, he said, is that it is more efficient; it converts 85% to 90% of the gas it starts with to useful work.

“That’s a very high system level efficiency,” Fournier said.

Sociology professor Rebecca Jean Emigh disagreed.

Instead, she calls this justification in the name of efficiency “greenwashing.”

“We don’t need a glossy sustainability report,” Emigh said. “We need real, real solutions, and also just to stop the greenwashing and just to admit where something really is not sustainable.”

Emigh helped organize Earth Day protests with the organization Climate Action Now, UCLA! on April 22, in which participants marched down Westwood Plaza to protest in front of the cogeneration plant.

The plant, she said, symbolizes sustainability problems more broadly, particularly because of its high carbon emissions. Emigh said she worries that if sufficient action is not taken, global temperatures will rise beyond a point where climate change can be reversed.

“If we go beyond that, there’s a point of no return,” she said. “A lot of the looping processes will kick in, and the damage will really be quite unrepairable.”

Shutting down the cogeneration plant is a matter of climate justice, Emigh said. Because energy infrastructure is often located in lowincome communities and communities of color, the gas emissions harm these groups in particular.

Consequently, high rates of asthma can result amongst these groups.

“That sort of cost-benefit analysis is completely ignoring all of the cost to our planet, to our health, to our poor communities of color,” she said. “Where are those things valued?”

Additionally, as other energy sources are modernized, the cogeneration plant falls behind in sustainability.

“As the grid transitions to 100% renewables, the plant as it currently operates will no longer be lower in carbon emissions PRIME | SPRING 2022

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than other energy sources,” Katz said.

Ultimately, there isn’t a straightforward answer. The campus needs power to operate, and power production inevitably creates emissions.

“It becomes a question of, what is the least environmentally impactful way of solving the problem that we have to solve?” Fournier said.

Looking forward As the University of California pursues plans for carbon neutrality by 2025, there is still progress to be made.

Fournier admitted that fully renewable technologies, such as solar and wind, are ideally preferred over the cogeneration plant. Yet these renewable technologies are not without difficulty as well.

“There’s a lot of challenges associated with implementing that type of solution within the context of a campus and the energy needs of a campus like UCLA,” he added.

If UCLA were to produce power using solar panels, problems would immediately arise, Fournier said.

There is not enough physical space on campus to place the number of solar panels required to power the entire property. Alternative sources of energy also must maintain the reliability and quality of the

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“

“

It becomes a question of what is the least environmentally impactful way of solving the problem that we have to solve?

current energy system; otherwise, sensitive research equipment or valuable samples that depend on constant refrigeration may be ruined.

“The campus falls into a high intentionality (intensity) energy use category that makes it particularly difficult to do things 100% with renewables,” said Fournier. “And that’s just a physical reality.”

However, not all hope is lost for the cogeneration plant and renewable energy.

“Currently, the strategy is to transition the fuel to biogas,” Katz said, mentioning a goal also outlined in the April 2022 UCLA Sustainability Plan. She added that later down the line, the cogeneration plant may be reduced to a smaller part of UCLA’s energy production.

Emigh had different ideas.

“What the sustainability office needs to be doing is sitting down and developing serious plans to get rid of that cogeneration plant,” she said.

Still, if UCLA hopes to achieve the greater sustainability goals it set out, it has a ways to go.

Fournier emphasized the importance of UCLA community members’ role as consumers of that energy in making change.

“We’re part of that (conversation),” he said. “We have to be a part of that solution as well, as the users of energy.” ♦ Contributing reports from Rachel Rothschild, PRIME contributor.

Behind the Aahs Curtain

written by ALYSSA BARDUGON photographed by JASON ZHU designed by LAUREN JAI

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M

y first weekend in Westwood, I walked

by Aahs! The Ultimate Gift Store – and I didn’t even notice it. The second time I walked by, I’m pretty sure I didn’t notice it either.

On the outskirts of Westwood Village, Aahs blends into plain sight. While mannequins sporting bright clothing fill the store’s windows, I never really gave the shop a second glance. I always thought of the building as a little dim and rundown – not characteristics I normally associate with a long-lasting business.

Almost two quarters into my freshman year, I finally walked through the front door of Aahs for the first time. Immediately, a sense of nostalgia washed over me – a sense that could only be explained by the store’s long history in Westwood Village. The fading sign on top of the store should have been a dead giveaway of Aahs’ longevity, but what really convinced me was the sheer amount of inventory packed on the store’s shelves. It became obvious that Aahs had a storied history, but what was that history exactly?

Aahs opened in Los Angeles in 1981 and quickly grew to seven locations across Southern California. During the early- to mid-1980s, the store cemented itself as part of Westwood Village’s well-documented commercial boom. But now, there are only two stores left – one of which is the silver-roofed building on the corner of Westwood Boulevard.

Chloe Childs is one of the few remaining Aahs staff members in Westwood. I approached Childs on a sunny Sunday morning after watching her patiently listen to a young boy excitedly inquire about a toy in stock.

“Who better to ask about the

history of Aahs?” I thought to myself.

Childs, a fourth-year psychobiology student, has been an Aahs sales associate since October and told me about the journey that led her behind the Aahs counter. Childs said she stumbled across Aahs during its busiest month after walking up and down the streets of Westwood handing out her resume to different businesses.

“They looked like they needed help because it was so hectic for Halloween,” Childs said. “So I literally just asked if they were hiring.”

Her boldness paid off, and she was hired on the spot after a quick interview. Halloween is always Aahs’ busiest time of year, Childs said, when the store comes to life with students looking for last-minute costumes. Childs said she got the job right away because Aahs was significantly

Aahs had a storied history, but what was that history exactly? understaffed. According to Childs, Aahs averages about 30 to 50 customers a day, but Halloween brings a wave of people that would not have walked in otherwise.

Immediately, Childs was thrown into the Halloween fray.

Although Aahs is similar to other customer service jobs she’s held in the past, Childs said the store’s eclectic inventory keeps the gig interesting. Eclectic is definitely one way to put it. I spotted a furry green Grinch costume and a book titled “52 Things to Do While You Screw” two aisles apart during our conversation.

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You don’t have to spend too much money over here to bring happiness to someone.

year. Jasleen Bhasin, Aahs’ current supervisor, said customers keep returning to the gift store because of its low prices.

“You don’t have to spend too much money over here to bring happiness to someone,” Bhasin said.

Forty-one years have passed since Aahs first opened up shop, but former customers still remember the store from its golden days in the 1980s.

According to John Nuckols, executive vice president and chief strategic officer of the LA Opera, Westwood was the place to be on weekends during the ’80s. With Aahs’ large assortment of unconventional products, the gift store held visitors’ attention before and after attending one of Westwood Village’s many movie premieres.

Although he mostly went into Aahs to burn time before screenings, Nuckols said he purchased a few greeting cards over the years. While I didn’t think twice when I spotted a card with, “I f*cking love you!” scrawled across the front at Aahs, Nuckols said such an item would have been an anomaly 40 years ago. This unreserved energy became yet another reason why customers flocked to Aahs, Nuckols added.

Musician Timothy Nishimoto was one such Aahs patron. Before Nishimoto was a performer with the band Pink Martini, he frequented Aahs during the ’80s too. As a young adult, Nishimoto had fun perusing the aisles of the “crazy huge party store.”

When I asked what drew him back to Aahs visit after visit, Nishimoto was quick to respond.

“It (Aahs) just seemed open and free. I remember I hadn’t been out of the closet for very long when I first moved there, so it was definitely a place that I felt comfortable,” Nishimoto said. “I don’t even

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really know if they had a lot of gay-specific things for sale there, but I do remember it having an open vibe – just open to everyone and anyone.”

Aahs made members of the LGBTQ+ community like himself feel represented, Nishimoto explained, and became a quasisafe space where he and other members of the LGBTQ+ community were accepted.

But Aahs’ early success in the 1980s was later impacted by the flux of Westwood Village. While Westwood had low violent crime rates then as compared to other LA areas, a shooting on the streets of the Village contributed to the neighborhood’s decline in popularity. On Jan. 30, 1988, 27-year-old graphic artist Karen Toshima was shot and killed walking down Broxton Avenue.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Toshima was caught in a crossfire between rival gangs.

After Toshima died, people started to avoid Westwood, Nuckols said. He vividly remembers the shift in the neighborhood’s reputation.

“People didn’t feel safe anymore,” Nuckols said.

Bhasin echoed this sentiment. The whole Village

felt the effects of gang violence, she said. Because gang activity in Westwood was rare, the shooting created a collective panic.

Westwood’s popularity declined dramatically along with the local economy, Bhasin added.

“It did affect everyone in the Village,” she said.

“It did make

people feel fear.”

On top of declining perceptions of the Village’s safety, the establishment of newer, upscale shopping centers around LA created competition that Westwood could not keep up with, the Daily Bruin reported in 2015. This drop in patronage triggered an economic decline that is still prevalent today. The retail vacancy rate in Westwood Village has jumped to almost 40%, according to 2021 data from the LA Department of City Planning.

Despite efforts to revitalize Westwood from multiple community-led organizations, it seems Aahs has yet to reach the level of acclaim it acquired during the 1980s. When I visited Aahs for the first time in February, I was the only customer in the store. I walked up and down the aisles, silently thanking whoever decided to play music over the speakers to conceal the store’s silence.

While the Aahs location in Westwood has managed to stay open for over 40 years, customers have mixed feelings about the business. Since 2005, it has accumulated over 60 Yelp ratings of two stars or below, bringing the average to just 2 1/2 stars.

I contacted Aahs owner Jack Bhasin multiple times for comment while writing this story, but he did not respond to my requests for an interview.

The only two Aahs locations still open today are in Torrance and Westwood Village. According to Jasleen Bhasin, the other branches closed because the leases ended on the properties.

As I see it, the story of Aahs is still being written.

In 2019, the Westwood store seemingly teetered on the edge of existence after the Santa Monica Mirror reported it was closing only for the paper to later correct the claim as Aahs lived to see another day.

Now, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Aahs is writing a new – still uncertain – chapter in its history. Like countless other non-essential

I do remember it having an open vibe.

Just open to everyone and anyone. businesses, the COVID-19 pandemic forced the gift store to close its doors completely for four months.

Aahs lost many employees during the beginning of the pandemic, and when the gift shop finally opened again, it was extremely understaffed, according to Jasleen Bhasin.

With a large percentage of the UCLA population studying remotely last school year, the store experienced another obstacle in its history, as many of Aahs’ customers come from the Bruin community. But Jasleen Bhasin sees a brighter future for the store as students fill campus again.

“We just need the support of all the students and the people who live around the Village,” said Jasleen Bhasin.

With students back in Westwood and less strict COVID-19 restrictions, more customers have been visiting Aahs recently, she added.

After years of economic decline in Westwood and a raging pandemic, Aahs has remained standing for 40 years. Will it endure for 40 more?

The last time I walked out its front door, I was faced with the same decision every customer must make after exiting the store. Standing on the street corner, I had to decide: turn back and head home or continue straight across Westwood’s main thoroughfare. I chose to carry on ahead. With time, we’ll see what decision awaits Aahs. ♦ PRIME | SPRING 2022

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up

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written by BREANNA DIAZ photographed by TONY MARTINEZ designed by TRISHA PATEL

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“N

ormal people probably think these are torture positions,” said Elsa Dubil, hanging upside down with her feet knotted in lavender aerial silks.

Indeed, the fourth-year bioengineering student’s posture looked extreme – her head a couple of inches from the ground – but I was impressed with how simple she made the technique seem to her students. All the performer needs to do is pull themselves up, use their feet to knot the thick fabric around their ankles, then slide their hands down the silks and let go.

Voila. An ankle hang.

Dubil is one of the founding members of Cirque de ’LA, the first and only circus arts club at UCLA. The organization began when fourth-year biology student Seneca Rubianes sought to find other students who shared an interest in circus arts.

During her freshman year, Rubianes wanted to learn more about aerial arts after performers on the beaches of Santa Monica piqued her interest.

Because circus arts classes are often expensive, Rubianes hoped to find experienced students she could learn from and practice with on campus. In her search for such students, Rubianes turned to social media. It was there she stumbled upon Dubil.

On Facebook, Dubil had posted about her circus artistry, and as the two began talking, Rubianes proposed starting a circus club together. Dubil,

whose experience with aerial silks began at 14 years old, teamed up with Rubianes and became her impromptu coach. Together, they began gathering other circus-oriented students at UCLA, officially forming Cirque de ’LA in 2019 in the hopes of teaching circus arts to people at a much more affordable and accessible level.

A month’s worth of classes at The Vertitude LA, a studio that teaches aerial arts, costs $99. However, Dubil said she aims to keep fees around $40 for an entire quarter’s worth of instruction. Although the sport is relatively niche, Rubianes said there is a growing interest in aerial arts that their club can provide a space for. The organization now boasts around 40 students who consistently attend classes, Rubianes estimated.

When it comes to circus arts, Katie Shanahan, a Cirque de ’LA board member and third-year economics and psychology student, said there are certain misconceptions the sport carries. For one, Shanahan explained that people often associate circus arts with clowns, not silks. Outsiders also perceive aerial arts as an impossibly difficult feat.

“People look at that (circus arts) and think it's completely unattainable, and it's this otherworldly thing,” Shanahan said. “I'm a firm believer that if you're willing to put in the work to build the strength, anybody can do it.”

In Cirque de ’LA’s classes, Dubil said instructors

a t k s i i n , g s i p s e u o c p r i l c e t a h W “ es of society and d i s t u o e h t on r i e u h n t i q g u n i e s n a ess.” c w o sh PRIME | SPRING 2022

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reel beginners in by helping them perform exciting tricks such as hanging upside down or spinning on silks. Once they’ve experienced the thrill of aerial arts, she said people are more willing to keep up with the art form, even though it takes effort to build the strength necessary for certain skills.

While specific body types are seen as ideal for some sports, such as gymnastics, circus arts is inclusive to everyone, Dubil said. Standing at 6 feet tall, Dubil felt too tall for gymnastics but found that her physique was not a barrier for circus.

“What circus is, is taking people on the outsides of society and showcasing their uniqueness,” she said. “You are the best circus performer if you are as unique as possible and you can do something that no one else can do.”

she stretched into a split position.

For Dubil, practicing aerial arts as a teenager helped tremendously with her own mental wellbeing, as it provided an outlet for her to meet new people and stay physically active. By teaching her own classes, she hopes to spread the healing effect of the sport to others, she said.

Circus arts has become a way for Dubil to find community with other aerial artists and express herself beyond spoken words. In the fall, Dubil gave what she described as the most powerful performance in her career as an aerial artist.

Performing to the song “Praying” by Kesha, Dubil dedicated her routine to victims of sexual assault and directed donations from audience members to the Rape Treatment Center in Santa Monica. Her

I sat in on Dubil’s class for intermediate cirque students one Tuesday evening. The night began with upbeat music floating out of Dubil’s speakers as participants rolled out their yoga mats. She, Shanahan and her students warmed up by running laps around the Broad Art Center, dropping to the floor for burpees and stretching out their shoulders and hips.

“This is therapy for people,” Dubil told the class as

heartfelt performance left the audience and herself in tears, she said, and their support that night was unlike anything she ever expected.

“It was the most I've ever been able to connect with an audience and with this community,” she told me.

This spring, Dubil held her first classes since December. Dubil felt it would be safest to avoid practicing in large groups during winter quarter

re a to

“We

ible ces ac b .” e ibl

to make t n a w o t u s u ny people as r cl j po u ll y ma ss s a

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“I’ll sacrifice myself if it’s for circus at UCLA.” because of the spike in COVID-19 cases fueled by the wave of the omicron variant. But that was not the first time the organization’s operations had come to a screeching halt – the pandemic had put nearly all club activities on pause during the previous school year. While classes were suspended, Cirque de ’LA members in the area were restricted to unofficial small-group practices.

Despite the nearly two-year hiatus, Dubil’s students effortlessly practiced pull-ups and other aerial skills as I watched, turning out flips I thought looked practically painless. In one skill, a student hung from their arms wrapped in silks then lifted their legs up and over their head into an upsidedown pike position. Watching each student practice,

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I saw the concentration in their faces as they focused on controlling their lifts, their whole bodies in motion.

Teaching silks is far different from practicing it herself, Dubil said. When performing a skill or routine, she explained she must stay attentive to her own body, minding its limits. But when teaching, Dubil said she must tailor her lessons to explain techniques as clearly as possible without confusing her students – all while ensuring no one gets hurt.

“We really don't do anything super scary until we've done it 100 times on the ground,” Dubil added.

Shanahan said the appeal of aerial skills is that they appear dangerous, but they are safe when done correctly and under supervision. As a coach to eight beginner-level students, Shanahan hosts her classes at Drake Stadium’s calisthenics course, but the variability of weather has made the outdoor location inconvenient. Sometimes, rain makes the ground too wet or wind blows the silks out of reach.

“Our priority at this point is we really want to make our club as accessible to as many people but still safe,” she said. “And the best way for us to do that would be to get a space in the Wooden Center.”

The effort to secure a practice space is as old

as the club itself. Rubianes said a major obstacle for the organization has been getting through to unresponsive administrators within UCLA Recreation. Alongside trying to secure a practice space, Cirque de ’LA considered becoming a part of UCLA Recreation so circus arts classes could be more accessible to the student body. Because of a lack of response from UCLA Recreation, the plan has come to a standstill.

Johnny Tu, a fourth-year human biology and society student and Cirque de ’LA board member, said he has led the club’s advocacy efforts by helping set up meetings with UCLA Recreation. But a common misconception administrators hold is that circus arts are particularly dangerous relative to other sports, even though performers use safety equipment such as crash mats, Tu explained.

Circus artists frequently implement hazard reduction strategies to prevent injury, Rubianes said. Personally, she holds back from attempting advanced skills if she has no spotter or feels she lacks the strength. With an apparatus such as the trapeze, safety lines and nets offer protection to performers. The most common injuries in circus arts typically include fabric burns and bruises, she explained.

To prove the safety of the apparatuses to administrators, Dubil said she had to climb a telephone pole in Sunset Canyon Recreation Center, improperly rig her silks from a bungee cord on the ropes course and hang several feet in the air.

“That's not how you rig a fabric whatsoever,” Dubil said. “But I said, ‘I'll sacrifice myself if it’s for circus at UCLA.’” In an emailed statement, UCLA Recreation maintained that indoor spaces such as Yates Gym are unsuitable for circus arts and that it would require an engineering study to determine whether the building can safely house aerial arts. Regardless, UCLA Recreation said they are still making goodfaith efforts with Cirque de ’LA leaders to explore the possibility of offering aerial arts as a recreation program in the future.

Now after four years, Cirque de ’LA’s board members have finally gathered the momentum to move their plans off the ground. Dubil said after multiple meetings, approvals, budgeting and safety checks, the club is in talks to establish a space for circus arts. Their progress was slow-going, but Dubil said she finally feels administrators are willing to cooperate with the organization as it has grown in size.

“Everyone would blow us off constantly because they've never seen it before. They don't know what it is,” Dubil said. “Now, I really have an army behind me.”

This year, Cirque de ’LA landed a spot in UCLA’s annual Spring Sing. Shanahan and Tu performed a duet, marking the first time Cirque de ’LA

performed in the showcase. With Spring Sing, Shanahan had the chance to share the sport she loves with a large audience, she said.

But following the high of Spring Sing, the club hopes to keep the momentum going. For the summer and fall, Dubil said she’ll still be around on campus hoping to find students who can take over her intermediate classes once she graduates. And in the coming years, Shanahan hopes a permanent, safer training space will keep the spirit of circus alive at UCLA. Once that is achieved, Cirque de ’LA will be able to welcome more students than ever before.

“We're all upperclassmen now,” Shanahan said. “(We’re) trying to find someone to carry on that legacy to make sure that what we've established here so far stays for future Bruins.” ♦ PRIME | SPRING 2022

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created by MEGAN FU

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Staying in

STEM? written by KATE GREEN & RACHEL ROTHSCHILD

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illustrated by DANIELLE NALANGAN

hao Li entered UCLA this fall with big dreams of studying the sciences. An admirer of ocean life, he set his sights on saving Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.

“Like any other child, it was my dream to be a marine biologist,” he said.

But by winter quarter, Li traded in his micropipette for a movie camera. In just one quarter, the hopeful marine biology student switched his major to film. What prompted this drastic change?

According to Li, now a first-year film and television student, he lacked support in his lower division science courses and constantly felt like he was in survival mode during class.

“I thought coming here (UCLA), I would finally get the science education that I was missing in high school,” he said. “It wasn’t like that at all.”

Li has not battled challenges in the sciences alone. His peers pursuing degrees in science, technology, engineering and mathematics at UCLA and universities nationwide are leaving their programs at alarming frequencies. According to 2019 data from UCLA’s Office of Academic Planning and Budget, 20% of life and physical sciences students switch to other fields, compared to 5% of humanities and social science students.

designed by CLAIRE SHEN

Furthermore, studies by the UCLA Higher Education Research Institute show that underrepresented students have a lower chance of completing their STEM degrees at more selective universities.

In the wake of such findings, many former STEM Bruins are attributing some of the blame to what they deem as unaccommodating and often inequitable lower division classes.

Education and Asian American studies professor Mitchell Chang described lower division courses such as calculus and organic chemistry as part of a phenomenon called weeder classes. So-called weeder classes are challenging introductory courses that often shake STEM students’ academic confidence, Chang said, and make students doubt their postgraduation plans. For example, pre-med students who struggle with organic chemistry courses may no longer envision themselves arriving at medical school, he said.

“They (students) don’t see other options for themselves in those fields, so they transfer out,” Chang said. “Not from physics to environmental studies or another science, but … they transfer out of STEM altogether.”

Chang said the culture of weeder classes comes from the faculty’s desire to only retain students who truly care about their fields of interest.

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For Bruins entering UCLA’s STEM departments, their majors often seem like the culmination of childhood aspirations. Firstyear anthropology student Rahaf Abumansour originally pursued a computer science major fueled by a high school love of artificial intelligence. Robotics consumed her teen years as she participated in state and national competitions in Saudi Arabia. However, family pressure to pursue a STEM degree weighed on her too.

“You’re always surrounded by family members that say, ‘Become an engineer, become a doctor.’ And it was always, ‘What are you going to do with an anthropology degree?’” she said.

Despite the forces pushing Abumansour to complete a STEM degree, her growing interest in anthropology – coupled with the steep learning curve she faced in her introductory computer science courses – caused her to switch her major by the end of her first quarter at UCLA, she said.

“I wasn’t motivated to code,” she said. “I wasn’t that excited to do things that I thought I was going to be really excited for, and I just felt myself lose a bit of my passion for the subject.”

Li shared a similar despondency over course material – but he also expressed frustration over inequity within weeder classes.

Expecting a fresh start in college, Li entered UCLA excited to make up for years of inadequate teaching in middle and high school, he said. But as soon as classes began, his chemistry professor assigned work assuming that all students entered the classroom having previously taken Advanced Placement chemistry. Li’s high school did not offer the course, so he immediately felt on the back foot.

“I grew up poor, I’m Black, I went to an inner city school, and we didn’t have the best resources afforded to us,” Li said.

He added that the chemistry professor ignored his emails inquiring about ADHD accommodations and support. The professor eventually responded to Li and advised him to drop the course, he said.

“One quarter was enough to be like, ‘Get out of this major man. You don’t belong here,’” Li said. “That’s

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how I felt. I always felt like I didn’t belong in the major.”

Fourth-year English student Buddy Al-Aydi transferred out of the biochemistry major in the fall of their second year at UCLA to pursue a more creative career.

Al-Aydi attended a rural high school, which he said often emphasized athletic success over STEM rigor, and grew similarly disillusioned with UCLA’s competitive weeder classes.

In order to catch up on the high school preparation they lacked, Al-Aydi attended office hours for their lab courses and signed up for tutoring with the professional chemistry fraternity Alpha Chi Sigma.

Still, he left his general chemistry lab final feeling devastated.

“I felt like I knew nothing that was on the paper,” they said. “I felt like I would be lucky to even pass this thing. It really solidified that I really don’t want to continue doing STEM anymore. I don’t like this feeling of not being able to understand what I’m reading or what I’m talking about.”

According to Chang, pre-college characteristics – such as taking certain advanced high school math courses – are strong predictors of STEM retention.

Chang’s research with HERI revealed that every additional completed year of high school math increases a student’s likelihood of graduating with a STEM degree.

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I always felt like I didn’t belong in the major.

Li believes this pattern is tied to frequently overlooked socioeconomic factors.

“People don’t talk about this,” Li said. “There’s this big privilege that comes with these classes, which is that if you didn’t have the privilege to be able to take certain classes before or get certain resources, you’re going to get weeded out and you’re not going to be able to continue with that major or degree.”

The issue of STEM retention does not impact students evenly across the board. HERI’s reports reveal that white students earn STEM degrees, as opposed to no degrees, at significantly higher rates than their Black, Latino and Native American peers. Additionally, research out of Wichita State

University identified a statistically significant While STEM involvement outside the classroom difference in higher education STEM retention might help some Bruins develop a passion for between female and male students, with fewer their field, it can intimidate underclassmen trying women completing their STEM degrees. to prioritize their coursework. Deterred by the Chang and time commitment, many STEM Abumansour students recognize decided to eschew I don’t like this feeling of not how students’ extracurriculars and underrepresented focus on school work being able to understand what identities intersect to ease her transition I’m reading or what I’m talking with a lack of into college. resources and affect “The first year, about. their experience I avoided clubs,” in weeder courses.

Abumansour said. “I When students wanted to get a sense find their identities of the quarter system underrepresented in places such as the classroom, and how college should be and how to maintain imposter syndrome may cause them to feel as if good grades.” they do not belong in those spaces – and they may But Chang encouraged students tackling STEM eventually decide to leave them. majors to seek engagement outside the classroom.

According to Chang, marginalized students within According to Chang, participating in study STEM can face microaggressions, including lower groups and academic enrichment activities such academic expectations from faculty and classmates. as undergraduate research increases students’ He added that these experiences can indicate interaction with their coursework and field overall, to students that they don’t belong in STEM and ultimately boosting retention. exacerbate prior educational inequities.

“All these things combine to create a stronger “When you stand out in such a way where you feel sense of a science identity,” Chang said. “That uneasy, that reduces your sense that you belong,” develops their motivation and increases their he said. “(This has) profound effects on students chances of succeeding. By that, I mean not who are more often than not already coming in at a only obtaining an undergraduate science disadvantage based on their preparation.” degree but also moving on Alumnus Daji Landis majored in math and recalled a general lack of student-centered to graduate instruction in her math courses, in which she studies.” was usually one of only a few women.

Recognizing Throughout her time in the math department, Landis occasionally toyed with the idea of changing to a less intensive program. She remembered experiencing test anxiety, a feeling she believes is more widely held among underrepresented demographics.

“I think there’s this classic difference where when women struggle, they think, ‘Oh, I’m the one struggling, it’s me, I don’t understand something,’” Landis said. “And when a guy struggles, you know, maybe he thinks more like, ‘Oh, well, if I don’t understand it, then no one does.’”

Landis’ sole female STEM professor advised her to seek out female mentors, whom she found in her research supervisor and in organizations such as the Women in Math Mentorship Program.

“I found community, I really liked the subject material, and we just sort of powered through the less-than-stellar,” Landis said.

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the benefits of cultivating students’ STEM But if they get here and the climate does not then identities, faculty and students alike are searching support them, then that can lead to them wanting for solutions to further integrate STEM support to leave the sciences.” programs into the classroom.

Another potential solution the University has According to discussed is to adopt a UCLA Community pass/no pass grading Programs Office system.

The system itself is not undergraduate EdSource recently retention advisor reported that providing the kind of support Nicole Ngaosi, departments across the office funds the UC system are and resources they need so that several programs considering scrapping all students can achieve equally specifically geared traditional letter toward STEM grades in favor and equitably. students. The of a pass/no pass CPO’s test bank structure. Such offers free study departments hope materials, and the the move will place Math Success Program provides peer counseling less pressure on students, especially first-year STEM and review sessions for core math courses, Ngaosi majors, to earn high marks, further encouraging added. Beyond test preparation, Ngaosi said the them to pursue their intended major.

MSP also holds social events and provides resources Aside from large-scale University initiatives, promoting the representation of diverse STEM students see alternative ways departments can professionals. improve lower division classes that deter STEM “Based on student feedback from projects and majors. Landis noted that courses not based services such as MSP, students report having better on exams can make the learning process more grades and higher likelihood to pursue academics enjoyable. and professional trajectories related to STEM,” “In the courses I had that weren’t exam-based, I Ngaosi said in an emailed statement. often did more work and felt less stress because I UCLA’s Center for Education Innovation and struggled a lot with test anxiety,” Landis said. “It’s Learning in the Sciences also currently leads another one of those things that tends to be more STEM retention initiatives – both the course Life prevalent in certain demographics that are not well Sciences 110: “Diversifying Career Pathways for represented.”

Life Science Students” and the Undergraduate Despite the successes of some courses and Learning Assistant Program serve to cultivate a UCLA initiatives in creating a more inclusive sense of belonging among life sciences students. environment, overarching issues still cause Life Sciences 110 seeks to increase students’ sense students to pursue other fields. While students of belonging by revealing new career options to life such as Abumansour switched majors because they sciences students, said CEILS wanted to explore a different executive director passion, other students such as Li ultimately made the Rachel Kennison, decision to change fields and the LA program of study, and desired further aims to boost careers, because of a lack morale by providing of academic support. For Bruins in lower such students, Landis division STEM courses said, increasing professor with undergraduate support would greatly teaching team impact their experience in members.

STEM. “The system itself is not providing the “Just having kind of support and accountability in teaching would do so much to help resources they need so underrepresented people,” that all students can Landis said. “Because the achieve equally and more resources there are, equitably,” Kennison the better people are going said. “They’re all top, to do.” ♦ top, top students.

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FAMILY STYLE

written by ESTHER MYERS photographed by MEGAN CAI designed by VICTORIA LI PRIME | SPRING 2022

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L LL

et’s set the scene. It’s been a long night out on fraternity row, and you are starting to feel the effects of dancing nonstop to Dua Lipa. You’re hungry, but it’s nearing 2 a.m. and In-N-Out Burger has taken its last orders for the night. You’re about to give up when you catch a whiff of – could it be? Hangry Moon’s, a fried chicken joint with an emphasis on family, is nestled between the In-N-Out drive-thru and Fat Sal’s, harboring a swarm of hungry students.

If you’re a Hangry Moon’s regular, chances are you’ll recognize a familiar face or two on the other side of the counter. Behind the Hangry Bites combo and the KBBQ Thicc fries is the Moon family, a team of four who have been a part of the Westwood latenight food scene since October 2018.

When I first met owner Danny Moon on a warm winter afternoon, the restaurant looked different than it did at night. Before our conversation, I had only seen the restaurant late in the evening, when the fryer bubbled loudly and the chatter of a full crew mingled with the voices of students in line.

When I visited, Danny worked with just one other employee, and the fryer remained silent behind them. This was Hangry Moon’s before sunset, prior to the masses arriving. I had eaten here before, but I didn’t know the story of the family behind it. I suspect many Bruins don’t.

The Moons run a tight ship out of a small storefront on Gayley Avenue, churning out orders of crispy yet juicy bites of chicken. On Friday nights, a long line of college students can be seen stretching past the joint’s small order window. But after talking to Danny for only a few minutes, I realized how unbothered he was by the fast-paced kitchen environment.

The Moons emigrated from South Korea to California nearly 20 years ago to seek higher wages and better educational opportunities for their children, Danny said. He left his career in the textile industry, and his wife Yun-Hee Kim traded in her job as a designer to start a new life in the United States.

“It was my first quarter at UCLA, and … we somehow had to operate this restaurant.”

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After several years of operating a food truck out of Orange County, Danny and Yun-Hee brought their business experience to Westwood when their eldest son Josh Moon, a fifth-year philosophy student, transferred to UCLA. His first quarter was marked by the opening of Hangry Moon’s, where he worked nearly full time as his family searched for other employees.

“It was my first quarter at UCLA, and I didn’t know what UCLA was about. It was so much harder than community college, and we somehow had to operate this restaurant,” Josh said. I was speaking to Josh over Zoom as he navigated traffic. We spoke for an hour during his commute. I got the impression being this busy was normal for him.

While Josh began school, he and his dad commuted from Irvine almost daily to get Hangry Moon’s off the ground. With Danny closing down the restaurant at 4 a.m. and needing to be back to open up shop again at 10 a.m., Josh said his father often didn’t have time to drive home for the night.

During that period, Danny frequently slept in his car.

“I felt really bad because my dad was sleeping in his car so that I could go to school,” Josh said.

But the push for a family-owned business was not just to support Josh as he started at UCLA. It was motivated in part by Danny’s desire to control his employment, Josh said. During his first decade in California, Danny worked as a waiter and then as a sushi chef. But after a severe fall from their home’s roof, Yun-Hee encouraged him to take time off from the demanding hours of his restaurant job.

“My mom was like, ‘No, you broke your back and your foot. You can’t go back to working those long

hours. It’s time to start your own business,’” Josh said.

That’s when the Moons dipped their toes into the food truck industry, working at music festivals and catering events. Then, when Josh got into UCLA, the family decided its next business venture would follow him to Westwood. There, Josh could help out at the family restaurant and contribute to funding his education.

Yun-Hee spearheaded the inception of Hangry Moon’s, from scouting a location in Westwood to designing the menu to include food that would satisfy late-night cravings as well as more balanced options for lunch and dinner. When deciding what dishes the restaurant would carry, she sought to cater to Westwood’s hungriest demographic, Josh said. What was universally appetizing to college students? Fried chicken, she decided.

“My mom straight up ate Raising Cane’s for a week

“We wanted our food to be an occasion (to) come together around.” just to see what the appeal was,” Josh said, laughing.

Apparently, her strategy paid off.

Ryan Yee, a third-year marine biology student, usually orders the Buffalo Thicc fries, a steaming plate of chicken tenders topped with buffalo sauce,

gooey melted cheese and the Moons’ signature Hangry sauce. The night I spoke to him, however, he wanted to try something new and ordered one of the Hangry rice bowls. Like the other students ordering food after traditional dinner hours, Yee said he often goes to Hangry Moon’s to satisfy his late-night cravings.

While Yun-Hee refined the menu, it was Josh’s idea to introduce “hangry” to the family business.

He proposed a name that paid homage to their family name with a catchy twist and captured what he thought would be the emotional state of customers – hungry and tired – when they came to the restaurant late at night. His parents, new to the concept of hangry, rolled with it.

“Josh told me like, ‘Oh, this is a new word.’ So I was like, ‘OK!’” Danny said with a laugh.

Family really is a trademark of Hangry Moon’s – all the way from the name to the portion sizes.

“All of our food, they’re not really individual, small portions,” Josh said. “They’re all family-sized portions. If you put two together, you can feed four or five people. We wanted our food to be an occasion (to) come together around.”

The emphasis on family manifests itself in the business’ operation, too. All hands are on deck to run Hangry Moon’s. Now, Josh’s younger brother Matthew Moon is starting to help out by working some weekends with his parents. Matthew and his parents make the trip from Irvine together, a drive that can take more than two hours in bad traffic.

The hefty commute has not been easy on his family, Josh said. And the Moons are not the only

ones on the team battling long drives just to make it to Westwood – the same reality faces employees who also live far from the Westside of Los Angeles.

Most of their staff members commute from Koreatown and downtown LA, Josh said.

“With our location being far from where workingclass people live, no one who lives in Beverly Hills is going to want to work at Hangry Moon’s,” he said.

The Moons have hired two full-time employees who have stayed with the business for several years, Josh said, but it seems they still have trouble keeping employees long term. Hangry Moon’s is not alone in this trend. According to Business Insider, the past year has seen a 144% employee turnover rate in fast-food restaurants nationwide, meaning establishments are losing employees faster than they can hire new ones.

But as the business slowly grows, Josh said Hangry Moon’s is trying to give its employees more benefits – benefits that Danny did not receive during his time as a sushi chef.

They’ve started offering monthly salaries, more extensive sick pay and paid time off on holidays to long-term employees, Danny said.

California law allows employers to limit sick pay to three days per year for each full-time employee, so the Moons’ approach is uncommon in the fastfood industry. But for the Moon family, it’s just part

of taking care of their team, Josh said.

“If this is someone who ... cares about the well-being of our restaurant and our family, in translation, then he is someone who is essentially part of the family and who we should treat like one,” Josh said.

Danny shows his appreciation for his staff in less direct ways too. Josh said his dad has been learning Spanish – his third language – to better communicate with his Spanish-speaking employees.

It’s just another way the Moons bring their family values into the kitchen.

With family and business matters intricately intertwined, the Moons have been forced to find ways to balance the two. In Hangry Moon’s first year of operation, Yun-Hee suffered a brain aneurysm, and shortly after, a second one that took the family by surprise. Danny took time away from the restaurant and modified its hours to aid her recovery, but they struggled to keep its doors open.

“I couldn’t think about anything about the business. First of all, I need to take care of my wife,” Danny said.

But the Moons found support in the most unlikely of places – Josh said his fraternity friends helped keep the business afloat by volunteering to work odd hours while his dad took care of his mom.

“They would overwork themselves knowing that my family needed the help,” Josh said. “So I am really thankful to them.”

The family’s anxiety around Yun-Hee’s injury has seemingly lingered despite her successful recovery.

She works less at the restaurant now, and so Danny has taken on most of the physical work at Hangry Moon’s.

Yun-Hee’s health, however, was not the last of the family’s challenges. Less than two years after opening, Hangry Moon’s was robbed. On Sept. 25, 2020, security footage showed a group of men breaking into the storefront and taking the cash from the register and the iPad used to

“Hearing Josh talk about the break-in sounded more like the Moons were the victim of a home invasion than a restaurant robbery.”

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take orders.

The family turned to Instagram for support from the community.

“Our family has struggled to pay rent and keep the business running since the beginning of the pandemic. To see what little we have being taken is heartbreaking to us,” their post about the incident

said. “If you would like to help out, please buy our food! We miss our customers, and the best way to help is to enjoy what we make.”

Josh said the robbery would have been devastating – especially earlier in the Hangry Moon’s operation – but luckily, it was a loss they could stomach with two years of business under their belt. The family was grateful for the sympathy they received from their customers, Josh said, and for their neighbors at Fat Sal’s, who offered their security camera footage of the incident.

In many ways, hearing Josh talk about the breakin sounded more like the Moons were the victim of a home invasion than a restaurant robbery. At one point during my conversation with Danny outside the storefront, a group of students walked past and waved at him like how someone might greet a neighbor on their front porch.

“I’m interviewing right now!” he said to them, laughing. He turned to me. “They’re my regular customers,” he said.

The next Sunday I visited, Danny chatted with me during a lull in service. The frier hissed quietly, and orders slowly pinged behind him as Yun-Hee and Matthew worked inside.

Josh wasn’t behind the counter that night. He’s taking a break from the family business to focus on his internship at a law firm.

Sixteen-year-old Matthew, the youngest of the family, has big plans for the future. He wants to go

to law school like his older brother, but unlike Josh, Matthew intends to major in computer science. It’s his fallback option, in case logic-based artificial intelligence is developed and replaces lawyers, he said to me soberly. I laughed. I think he’s going to do just fine.

When I last spoke to the Moons, they seemed hopeful. On the horizon is Josh’s graduation, and afterward, he plans to continue at his law internship as a full-time legal assistant. Danny, for the first time since opening the business, is taking some time for himself and cutting down on the late-night hours.

Still, Sundays are family nights for the Moons, who make the trip to Westwood to work a shift together. Behind the counter, Matthew chopped crunchy chicken cutlets into bite-sized pieces. YunHee, who comes in on Sundays just to be with her son and husband, bagged orders next to him.

“Honestly, I don’t need her help,” Danny said. “I have employees. I can do it. But she just wants to spend time with me, so we come together.”

It was only 8 p.m. There were still another five hours of service ahead.

After we finished speaking, I thanked Danny for his time, and he thanked me for mine. I waved goodbye and began my walk home down Gayley Avenue. He would be frying chicken with his family long after I left. ♦ PRIME | SPRING 2022

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ON THE THE FIELD, FIELD, ON OFF THE THE FIELD FIELD OFF

tepping into Yates Gym, Anna Glenn immediately burst into tears.

After three years of early mornings on the mat, Glenn, a UCLA gymnastics alumnus, hit a breaking point during her senior year. All she wanted was to leave behind her long, tumultuous relationship with injuries and medically retire.

“I walked into the gym, and I was like, ‘I don’t want to be here. I hate being here,’” Glenn said. “‘I can’t handle even stepping foot into this gym.’”

As high-profile athletes – including Olympians Naomi Osaka and Simone Biles – have sparked conversations about the need to prioritize mental health in sports, UCLA student-athletes are working to open the discussion on campus. Incidents such as the recent death by suicide of Katie Meyer, the goalkeeper and captain of Stanford’s women’s soccer team, highlight that athletes’ mental health needs to be discussed.

“We are seeing a growing number of professional athletes speak about their own struggles and become mental health advocates. We are striving to build a community where taking care of one’s emotional health is a priority and approached as something that everyone is invested in,” said Melinda Kirschner, the director of student-athlete mental health programming with UCLA Counseling and Psychological Services, in an emailed statement.

Back-to-back injuries ruined Glenn’s chance to compete her freshman year, which she said took a toll on her mental health. It was during this period that she first experienced depression and reached out to CAPS for therapy, Glenn said. Though working with CAPS helped her begin to accept her injuries, she said recurring health issues throughout her junior and senior years weighed heavily on her.

Glenn said her ongoing injuries could be

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attributed in part to the perfectionist mindset she adopted at a young age. Her coach was a stickler for details, Glenn said, and instilled this attitude in her.

Repetitive motion during practice eventually took a toll on Glenn.

“Whenever something wasn’t perfect, then I would get so frustrated, and I would keep doing it over and over and over again until I got it right,” she said. “That, I think, eventually led up to some of the injuries that I ended up having.”

Later in her junior and senior years, as new and old injuries accumulated, Glenn said she felt immense disappointment as she watched her teammates from the sidelines, longing to fulfill her competitive potential. Her perfectionism made it difficult to accept that her college career had veered so far off course, she added.

Kirschner said perfectionism and performancerelated pressure are two of the key stressors faced by college athletes. Josh Woods, an alumnus who played for UCLA football from 2015 to 2019, agreed.

Now a linebacker for the BC Lions, Woods compared life as a UCLA student-athlete to living under a microscope.

“Any little slip-up or mistake, ... a coach can see that as a weakness,” Woods said.

For Woods, perfectionism exacerbated the intense external pressure associated with the fame of UCLA Athletics. As a member of the football team, he said every game required him to perform in front of thousands of fans – a burden most of his classmates didn’t shoulder.

“They (non-student-athletes) are not going to take their midterms and finals in the middle of the Rose Bowl in front of 40, 50,000, 60,000 people,” Woods said. “And every time that they get a question wrong, they’re not getting booed.”

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And yet, as a high-level collegiate athlete pursuing a professional career, Woods had to learn to tune out the noise – a feat made difficult by scathing criticism on social media and the discouraging manner in which people spoke about his team, he said.

But the pressure athletes face extends far beyond performance on the field.

For Lanea Tuiasosopo, a former UCLA rowing athlete who served as the team’s

captain during her senior year, a typical day started at 5 a.m. and included a mix of long practices, rehabilitation work, weight training and classes.

As a walk-on athlete without any previous rowing experience, her first two quarters were dominated by her determination to learn the sport.

“I don’t think I had much of a personal life,” Tuiasosopo said. “I was just trying to get through school, make sure my grades were top-notch and then get through practice every day without having a breakdown.”

She said over time, as her comfort with the sport increased, she began adjusting to both the fitness level needed for rowing and the academic rigor of the quarter system. Tuiasosopo added that she

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learned to take full advantage of short 15-minute breaks and appreciate the busy schedule for always giving her something to look forward to.

For Glenn, accepting the limits gymnastics placed on her social life was difficult. As one of the few members of her team who joined organizations outside of athletics, Glenn was involved with the Association of Chinese Americans – but not to the extent she wished to be.

Oftentimes, her

gymnastics schedule prevented her from attending ACA events, she said, and in those moments, she remembers wishing she wasn’t a student-athlete.

“There were days when I was just like, ‘I don’t want to do my sport anymore because I want to socialize,’” she said. “Having to sacrifice those things and having to sacrifice the college experience a little bit was tough.”

But just like other students, UCLA’s studentathletes face emotional traumas outside of their lives in sports. Women’s tennis junior Abbey Forbes said the busy lifestyle of her freshman year actually provided her with an escape from worries at home – her younger brother Luke had been diagnosed with cancer the summer before her first year at UCLA. When the COVID-19 pandemic forced her to isolate at home, Forbes said the buildup of her neglected sadness all came crashing down.

“I, at one point, just let go and said, ‘I can’t handle this by myself anymore,’” Forbes said. “‘I have to speak up. I have to talk to a counselor because this is all too much for me.’”

When she reached out, UCLA Athletics put her in contact with a therapist from CAPS. Forbes said she has not needed to seek help besides CAPS because her therapist works to be flexible with her schedule and outside services are so costly. Besides

counseling, she’s also learned to lean heavily on her teammates. “(Women’s tennis juniors) Sasha (Vagramov) and Caroline (Goldberg) were like my two arms,” Forbes said. “They were on me, helping me, they were giving me things to do. ... If I didn’t have those two with me, I guarantee you that I wouldn’t be the person that I am today, and I wouldn’t have the view on life that I do today.”

Forbes said Vagramov’s naturally adventurous personality helped push her to explore Los Angeles during the isolation of the pandemic. She found people to relate to in both Vagramov and Goldberg – people to confide in and vent to. Forbes added that by sharing experiences with one another, the three of them were able to accept their emotions.

Opening the discussion about mental health is particularly important for athletes because they are taught that they should be able to grind through even the toughest conditions, Forbes said.

“It’s very difficult for us to open up and say, ‘Hey, I’m actually struggling with something,’” she added.

Similar to Forbes, Tuiasosopo discovered support in her community and therapy after she lost a teammate to suicide in fall 2018. As a team

leader, she said she struggled with feelings of guilt and responsibility in the wake of the tragedy, struggling to accept that no one held blame for the incident.

As she learned to confront her emotions, Tuiasosopo found a friend in Woods, who had recently been in the same position. For Woods, the death of one of his high school teammates by suicide completely changed his perspective on mental health.

He found himself becoming an advocate and supporting other athletes during their times of mental crisis. For Tuiasosopo specifically, he devoted special attention to reminding her of her relationship with God. Tuiasosopo also received both group and oneon-one therapy from CAPS during this period. And though Tuiasosopo’s experience was largely positive, Woods said CAPS failed to provide the support he needed.

Woods first sought help during his freshman year because of ongoing difficulty in the academic transition from high school to college, as he struggled to maintain focus in the classroom and adopt healthy time management skills. In

“There were days when I was just like, ‘I don’t want to do my sport anymore.’”

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seeking support, he said he wanted to feel genuinely cared for, but his experience with CAPS did not meet this standard.

“It felt like they were trying to tell me what’s wrong with me and not have a genuine discussion,” he said.

Instead of continuing with CAPS, Woods turned to his friends, family and church community in athletics.

plan offered to support student-athletes during their time at UCLA,” Kirschner added.

Recognizing the need for greater support within the athletic community, Tuiasosopo and her former UCLA rowing teammate Lauren O’Donohue co-founded an annual Resilience Run in honor of their late teammate. With support for the movement continually pouring in, the two decided to officialize it into a nonprofit organization, now known as Resilience Rally. Tuiasosopo said her involvement in the movement has allowed her to let go of the guilt that had followed her.

“In a lot of ways, it’s been healing because in carving out a space for other people to talk about these issues, I’ve been able to talk about it myself,” Tuiasosopo said.

“I can talk about these things openly and cry and laugh and feel a whole scale of emotions and know that I’m accepted and loved.”

Focusing specifically on campus programs, Tuiasosopo emphasized the need for preemptive work rather than reactionary movements, promoting investment in better resources and a need to rethink the immense pressure placed on student-athletes. She added that with the proper support, they can learn to address their mental health while simultaneously continuing to love their sport and appreciate the joys of being a student-athlete.

“For me, in this field, I’m sad that I’m constantly reminded of why what we’re doing is important,” Tuiasosopo said. “I live for the day when I’m like, ‘Oh, this isn’t really that urgent anymore.’” ♦

“I wasn’t alone through anything,” he said. “Just having people there to understand you and hear you and actually care makes things a lot easier than dealing with it yourself.”

But Woods said many players opt not to seek help out of fear of judgment from coaches and physical trainers. To mitigate the long-term damage of this pattern, he suggested every team have a mental health specialist on staff that the players can turn to. Over at CAPS, Kirschner said her team, alongside UCLA Athletics, is working to build a specialized program to address the mental health of studentathletes, based on recommendations from the NCAA. “We want to continue to reduce the stigma around utilization of mental health services and build mental health programming into the comprehensive health

40

OF S N A HUM

written by DEVON WHALEN photographed by ASHLEY KENNEY designed by SHIRLEY YAO

T

“

he corner of Weyburn and Broxton avenues in Westwood is home to a business of incredible cultural significance, one where visitors can be entertained, terrified and even have their hearts touched by the stories they watch unfold while drinking beverages most agree are more expensive than they ought to be. And next door, there’s also a movie theater.

I’m speaking, of course, of Starbucks.

I met a man I’m fairly sure was in the mob at thatv Starbucks once.

Nice guy. One time I overheard two men in sweaters meet and bond over sobriety and – minutes later – heard them threaten to call 911 on each other. I’ve even become acquainted with a regular who refuses to tell me her name but always has something to offer about the history of the Village.

Whenever I tell my friends these stories, I’m continually met with one question: “Why does the wildest stuff always happen to you at Starbucks?”

It’s a good question. So in April, I set out to find the answer.

For three weeks, I made that Starbucks my home. Breaking a fair few social norms, I people-watched and interviewed patrons at all hours of the day, from the store’s 4:30 a.m. opening to its 10 p.m. closing. I even stuck around the patio to write with the store closed for Passover. I met men and women, lifelong Angelenos and transplants, people who shared my sweet tooth and plain coffee devotees. To save you the same trouble, here I present the humans of the Westwood Starbucks.

Why does the wildest stuff always happen to you at Starbucks?

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On April 7, the first official day of interviewing, I met Judit Csotsits on the patio. She had a wood-plated fork and was grazing on a salad she’d brought from home, being kept halfway out of the glaring sun by the table’s umbrella. She’s a visual arts educator at the nearby Geffen

Academy, a UCLA-affiliated school for sixth through 12th graders. Csotsits came to Los Angeles at age 9, she told me, her parents fleeing political persecution in Hungary. She practices Kundalini yoga and hikes four hours with the Santa Monica Hiking Club every Sunday. Her Starbucks order is a large iced Americano with cold foam.

We had been talking about meditation for 70 seconds before I asked her to lead me in a breathing exercise. It must have been something about the energy of the patio that convinced me this was not an odd conversational move to make.

“Well, there’s the Om chant,” she said without skipping a beat. “I don’t know if you’re familiar with that.” I was, but only from ill-formed caricatures of Zen monks and Woodstock attendees – not in the context of real meditation or its practitioners.

We really should have been sitting in the lotus position, she told me, but the gridded iron arms on our chairs didn’t quite permit it. Straight spines and feet firmly planted on the ground would have to do.

“This is called the Gyan Mudra, where you attach the index finger to the thumb,” she said, demonstrating for me. I dutifully mimicked her, my hands held flat towards the sky, each index finger and thumb touched together into little rings.

“The thumb represents the ego, so you’re trying to bring the ego under control,” Csotsits told me.

She’d talked earlier about the culture shock of LA individualism as a young Hungarian immigrant. The ego is, I suppose, less controlled in this town than in most.

“And then you just breathe in deeply,” she instructed. I did.

“You close your eyes,” she added. I did.

“You look into your third eye, which is right here in between the eyebrows,” she said. I tried to. I imagine she must’ve tapped the space between her brows then, but two of my eyes were closed and I wasn’t in tune enough with the third to catch it.

“And then you just do a – Ommmmm,” she said, relaxing into the chant.

I’ll admit what I did was more of a low hum than a full articulation, but it was something – something genuinely calming and centering. I think of this moment often now. My speech therapist tells me that when I catch my voice drifting higher than I’d like it, I should touch my hand to my chest and say “Mm-hm” to reset my pitch. “Mm-hm” works, but ever since meeting Csotsits, I’ve preferred to hum.

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I remember humming before approaching Dimitri Magganas a week later. It was about 6:40 a.m. I’d been at Starbucks two hours already. I wasn’t on the patio this time, as skateboarding over from the dorms in the early morning dark taught me by the time I arrived that 55 degrees was too cold to justify outdoor seating.

I ordered the day’s first drink, a grande cinnamon dolce latte with soy milk, and then spent the two hours sitting in comfortable quiet with Ashley Kenney, a recent UCLA graduate and the photographer who volunteered for the article that involved a pre-dawn Starbucks trip. At around 6:40 a.m., when she’d made it through 100 pages of her book and I’d treated my Notes app to a 2,500 word play-by-play of the morning, I prepared my voice with a hum and approached Magganas.

Magganas is a commercial real estate property manager born in Athens, Greece, and raised near the Acropolis. Although he lives in Oakland, he was two weeks into a Westwood trip that morning, staying in an apartment a block away while visiting his son at UCLA. The Starbucks is very conveniently located, he told me, so he starts his days here, drinking regular coffee with half-and-half.

Most people I approach at Starbucks are not interested in talking, and those who speak often do so with great caution initially. Magganas held no such reservations.

“Can you talk a little bit about your relationship with your family?” I asked. I was curious. I’d never met or even heard of a parent visiting a child at school for weeks at a time, especially when that child is a doctoral student. “If it’s not too personal – you don’t have to share anything you aren’t comfortable with.”

“Nothing is too personal for me,” he interrupted.

“I always ask personal questions. Those who don’t want to answer, they don’t answer, or they evade.”

I feel a need to make some things about Magganas quite explicit. He is a UC Berkeley-trained economist and one of the most analytical, intelligent people I’ve ever met. Each answer he gave thus wandered quickly and inevitably into a lengthy economic treatise. A full five minutes passed after I asked the question before I actually learned anything about his family.

About 15 years ago, he told me, he took several steps back from professional life when his sons were 10

and 12.

“I was working, but I would not pursue any new projects, no new investments,” he said. “I would overlook business opportunities in order to pay quality, undivided attention to them.”

He quickly clarified.

“That does not mean babysitting or a short leash,” he said. “That means traveling, going to consulates, embassies, Washington D.C., city halls, lectures.” I doubt he was exaggerating about the embassies and consulates. He told me he had worked with Gov. Gavin Newsom during his early days as mayor of San Francisco and met President Joe Biden during Biden’s time in the Senate.

He wandered back into the land of policy and economy. I tugged us once more towards family.

Magganas had so far missed no opportunity to inform me that the world is all but doomed if we don’t tear down our current political systems and

“

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We all have emotions, and you should not deny that.

”

rebuild them anew. This paradigm shift, he said, is 20 years overdue and still nowhere in sight.

How does it feel, I wondered, to see so little hope in the future his sons now march towards? What role does emotion play in that world?

“We all have emotions,” he carefully stated. “And you should not deny that.”

But they can be blinding, he told me, and ought to have no role in geopolitical decision-making – or his sons’ lives.

“I always would counsel them to strike out (extreme emotions) as totally unacceptable. Hatred or love,” Magganas said. He caught me off guard with that last bit, and he seemed to know it.

“They’re the two sides of the same coin,” he explained. “They could both be very destructive.”

I took up the challenge he’d laid out half an hour ago; nothing is too personal.

“When you say love, it can mean many things,” I said.

He agreed, reminding me that his native tongue, Greek, has seven different verbs for love. Without thinking, I asked a question I never thought I would pose to a near-stranger in Starbucks as the sun rose outside.

“Do you tell your family you love them?” I asked.

“No, I have never told my family,” he said. “You hear, many times, parents or others say ‘I love you.’

No. I can never use that verb.”

“

who emailed me the next day to remind me that I should not include their names in this article, lest the press bother them.

He’s more than just a family man, too. He’s a savvy political mind with grand notions of how to better the world.

“Huge, huge changes are needed,” he said. “At the very, very local level.”

Among those fighting for such changes is London Taylor – a man with an infectious smile. I met him on a sunny morning in early April.

Love is not based on anything.

Respect is based.”

The English-speaking world is too liberal with the word, he said, too ready to apply it in too many situations that are too undeserving of such a serious concept.

“Respect is a lot more useful and cerebral and logical,” he told me. “Love is not based on anything.

Respect is based.”

Love can blind, he explained. Love for a person can persist despite their terrible behavior, their despicable values. We let it remain, unearned, long after respect is lost.

“Have you told your spouse, your children, that you respect them?” I couldn’t resist asking. From the way he talked about his family, whatever he felt about them is something I’d call love.

“No,” he said firmly. “You need to do this by deeds and acts and actions and lack of actions – not verbally.”

I thought of Magganas choosing his sons over advancing his career and of the weeks he spends here visiting. When I look at his words now – when I think of them in the abstract – they sound so harsh.

Maybe they are. But English words, as he told me multiple times, are often not quite up to the task of communicating his reality.

Magganas is a father who does not tell his family he loves them, yes. He’s also a father who gave me glowing accounts of his sons and their accomplishments minutes after we met, and one

I could be convinced that this Starbucks is an annex of the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, especially in the mornings. It’s not, but going purely off the number of customers in scrubs and black vests emblazoned with the UCLA Health logo, it could be. Even some street-clothed patrons are

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here for a pick-me-up before reporting to work at the hospital. There’s really no way to know if you’re the only customer present who won’t be breathing stale hospital air today without asking strangers about their jobs.

Asking strangers about their jobs is in fact how I know the hospital’s inhabitants extend beyond the uniformed. I never expected to talk to anyone from the medical center. They tended to flit in and out with such efficiency that I didn’t dare disrupt the ritual. But when I first saw Taylor, he was sitting on his phone at the counter by the window.

He seemed relaxed – just the kind of person who might have a moment to chat.

I invited him outside – almost everything interesting happens on the patio – and we talked for a brief 10 minutes before life beckoned him away. As a union organizer at the hospital and member of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, he told me his days never look quite the same.

Taylor was by far the most joyous and smiley stranger I approached at Starbucks. He was drinking a shaken almond milk espresso, though he said he’d have preferred it to be a Snickers Frappuccino.

He’s from Sacramento, he told me, and came to LA in 2016 as part of a big life change – an exciting escape from his hometown’s sleepiness and a bolder, riskier move than anyone at home realized.

“I came out here for a six-week internship,” he told me. “I didn’t tell anyone, like, this is not a guaranteed job.”

He grinned.

“I really bet on myself in that moment,” he said.

He had never worked in labor organizing before taking that position with Service Employees International Union – not even as an activist.

“I just knew I liked helping people,” he said. “And it was just so eye-opening.”

He’s been working in labor ever since, coming to Westwood for AFSCME Local 3299 in 2018.

“I wouldn’t say it’s all roses and daisies,” he admitted, voice cheery as ever despite the subject matter. “There are moments, as an organizer, I’ve gotten in my car and been in tears.”

I can imagine. During a three-year contract dispute, he helped lead six strikes at the hospital, he told me.

Convincing workers to lose wages for a strike is, as he explained, a difficult feat. To do it six times is more difficult still.

“But when I’m speaking to a worker and they feel empowered to fight for themselves, it makes it all worth it,” he added with a smile.

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“ I wouldn’t say it’s all roses and daisies.

”

Taylor is, like Csotsits, a hiker. One of his favorite hikes is the Los Leones Trail in Pacific Palisades. Csotsits, I’ll remind you, is a member of the Santa Monica Hiking Club – a club that will host a potluck at the same trail in July.

Csotsits and Taylor do not know each other, as far as I’m aware. But with this upcoming event, there exists the smallest possibility that the two may meet.

They may share with each other what they both told me: that they find happiness on hikes and that these moments in nature stay with them.

To my knowledge, Csotsits does not know Magganas, either, and they will in all likelihood never meet. If they ever did strike up a conversation, though, they might find themselves on common ground rather quickly. They are both European immigrants and UC grads who espoused the importance of education, of children pursuing their passion and of individuals taking action to create the world they want.

Talking to strangers is not part of Starbucks’ social etiquette. Speaking from experience, most people won’t indulge attempts to do so. They’re focused on themselves, and at Starbucks, why shouldn’t they be?

Meeting random people is not the reason anyone goes there.

I’m still glad I made it my reason.

A fantastical amount of human experience coalesces each day within this coffee shop. That is itself a marvel that often goes unappreciated. More marvelous, perhaps, is the terribly short distance between it all. I can make a six-minute trip from my bed and learn from a stranger how to access my third eye or fix the U.S. economy.

I did not know when I met Csotsits that she was an artist. She did not know when she met me that I used to consider myself one, too, or that I once submitted art portfolios with my college applications. But she is, and I did, and when I asked the thematic focus of her work, her response felt like some little nod from fate.

“A depiction of a connection of humanity,” she said. “Really learning to respect the environment and other people as if they were part of us.”

We are tied to the world we inhabit, she explained, as separate as the two may seem.

“We’re so connected in every possible way,” Csotsits said. ♦

STAFF

prime.dailybruin.com Justin Huwe [PRIME director] Abigail Siatkowski [PRIME content editor] Emily Dembinski [PRIME art director] Emily Kim, Alyssa Bardugon, Breanna Diaz, Megan Fu, Kate Green, Rachel Rothschild, Esther Myers, Dylan Tzung, Devon Whalen [writers] Ashley Kenney [photo editor] Jason Zhu, Tony Martinez, Megan Cai [photographers] Kimi Jung, Megan Fu, Danielle Nalangan, Maddie Rausa [illustrators] Lauren Ho [design director] Annie Bou, Lauren Jai, Trisha Patel, Claire Shen, Victoria Li, Samantha Fredberg, Shirley Yao, Emily Tang [designers] Maddie McDonagh, Kaiya Pomeroy-Tso [copy chiefs] Dylan Du, Isabelle Friedman, Gabriella Kchozyan, Ramona Mukherji, Sabrina Munaco, Cassidy Von Musser [slot editors] Mattie Sanseverino [online director] Charles Liu, Tommy Vo Tran [assistant online editors] Richard Yang [PRIME website creator] Breanna Diaz, Zinnia Finn, Megan Fu, Kate Green, Rania Soetirto, Megan Tagami [PRIME staff] Iman Baber, Alyssa Bardugon, Mitra Beiglari, Kaitlin Browne, Sarah Choudhary, Chloe Colligan, Alexa Cyr, Emily Kim, Esther Myers, Carlos Ramirez, Rachel Rothschild, Martin Sevcik, Natalie Tabibian, Dylan Tzung, Devon Whalen [PRIME contributors]

Genesis Qu [editor in chief] Cecile Wu [managing editor] Shirley Yao [digital managing editor] Jeremy Wildman [business manager] Abigail Goldman [editorial advisor]

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