A San Jose State masters student has been awarded a $10,000 scholarship from the Aquarium of the Pacific’s African American Scholar program.
Gregory Smith is earning his masters degree in biological science, with a concentration in ecology and evolution.
He was awarded the scholarship for his fieldwork studying seabirds in the Farallon Islands near San Francisco and on seabird islands in Maine, Florida and Oregon, since his graduation from the College of the Atlantic in 2010.
Alie LeBeau, director of STEM Pathway Initiatives at the Aquarium of the Pacific, said this scholarship was created in 2020 as a way to address the lack of diversity in marine sciences and aquarium-related fields.
She said recipients of the award have the opportunity to participate in programs through the aquarium based on their research, including communicating with the public.
According to LeBeau, recipients can also form a “community of likeminded Black and African American marine scientists.”
“[The Aquarium of the Pacific] really hopes that [scholarship recipients] build community among each other as a California based marine science group,” LeBeau said. “We hope that they are able to connect with each other, share resources, be supportive, share interests and just continue to grow that community of Black and African American students that are engaged in similar work.”
Smith obtained his bachelor’s in biology from the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine.
He said since then he’s collected bird data for various projects with different universities through fieldwork over the years.
Smith said before the pandemic, he wanted to go back to school to land more desirable jobs, which led him to SJSU’s master’s program led by Professor of
“The seabird world is really small, so you kind of get to know who are the professors who do that kind of work,” Smith said. “Scott Shaffer is a pretty well known name, especially on the West Coast.”
Shaffer said he couldn’t be prouder of Smith for receiving this award.
“I’m continually impressed by Greg’s analytical skills,” Shaffer said. “He has done an amazing job working on a complex data set.”
Shaffer’s research at SJSU covers physiological ecology of birds and how living things function within the environment.
Shaffer said Smith’s master’s project is attempting to answer “some fundamental life history questions” of the Cassin’s auklet, a small diving seabird.
“Greg is working with a large data set of
breeding histories and population dynamics going back 30 plus years for a population of Cassin’s auklets that nest at the Farallon Islands off San Francisco,” Shaffer said. “This is a collaborative effort with our partners at Point Blue Conservation Science in Petaluma.”
Point Blue Conservation Science is a nonprofit wildlife conservation and research organization focused on climatesmart conservation and inclusion across the different forms of diversity, according to their website.
A Cassin’s auklet is a small, but rotund seabird that breeds in colonies on islands throughout the Eastern North Pacific, according to a bird identification webpage created by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
Smith said he worked with and had interest in these birds 10 years prior to his time at Point Blue Conservation Science, which brought him to research the species
during his masters.
“This species particularly spoke to me because they are one of the birds you handle pretty often, so you build some sort of relationship with them,” he said. “They have a really cool history and biology that is kind of unique to them, and it’s something you don’t see in a lot of other seabirds.”
Smith said after college, he wants to do meaningful research that pushes conservation.
“Part of my interest in the sciences is that I want to make the sciences a little bit more accessible, especially [for] the brown and Black folks,” Smith said. “Just making it accessible for folks, opening those doors and kind of making it a little bit easier.”
FollowAlex Mather, co-founder of The Athletic, a sports media company, looked down at his phone with unease on Friday afternoon during a sports journalism panel inside the Hyatt Regency in San Francisco.
The former tech mogul just received a notification that Silicon Valley Bank had collapsed and that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) had taken over the bank’s operations.
The one problem: The Athletic’s financial holdings were at Silicon Valley Bank.
In the middle of Mather answering questions from students, he received a phone call.
“I gotta take this. Payroll is on Monday,” Mather said.
Silicon Valley Bank collapsed on Friday, forcing the FDIC to take control of the bank and develop a financial plan to address the largest bank failure since the 2008 financial crisis, according to a Sunday New York Times article.
The FDIC is an independent agency protecting depositors of an insured bank against the loss of their deposits in case of bank failure, according to its website.
Silicon Valley Bank’s failure is connected to high interest rates –applied by the U.S. government to face inflation – and a significant withdrawal from part of its customers, according to a Monday New York Times article.
Justin Rietz, economics assistant professor at San Jose State, said the bank is not the only financial institution facing high interest rates.
“Silicon Valley Bank wasn’t as prepared as they should have been for this type of situation,” Rietz said.
He said the bank did not have enough cash deposits to face the high requests
from its customers.
“Silicon Valley Bank had a lot of their assets in bonds,” Rietz said. “And government bonds, as interest rates are going up, the value of those bonds is dropping, but they still have the same amount of deposits for customers.”
He said, as customers wanted to cash out, the bank had to sell off its bonds to catch up with the demands, but those bonds weren’t worth as much as they had planned on, causing it to fail to raise enough money.
SJSU finance assistant professor Matthew Faulkner said since 2008, interest rates have been very low.
“So that means the idea of just money flowing through an economy and borrowing money is really, really cheap to get your hands on,” Faulkner said.
He said interest rates have significantly increased over the last decade.
“The reason they raised those interest rates was because inflation was getting out of control,” Faulkner said. “So that’s one way to combat that, which means stop spending so much money.”
The Silicon Valley Bank collapse raised concerns among bank customers across the country, according to a Friday New York Times article.
President Joe Biden said the American banking system is safe during a press conference on Monday.
“Americans can have confidence that the banking system is safe,” Biden said. “Your deposits will be there when you need them.”
Rietz said he has no doubt the government is trying to instill confidence in the banking system to avoid the panic which could possibly lead to massive cash withdrawals from the banking system.
“I bet Janet Yellen, the treasury secretary who used to be the head of the Federal Reserve,
told them over the weekend, ‘You need to go out and say this,’ ” Rietz said.
San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan said he was disappointed that Yellen did not support bailing out Silicon Valley Bank. He said businesses could be in danger of shutting down if the federal government does not step in.
“The secretary’s approach is weak, half-hearted and wrong,” Mahan said. “We don’t have time to wait for a white knight to swoop in and acquire the bank. Half of Silicon Valley’s startups are at risk of missing payroll in the days ahead if the FDIC doesn’t guarantee and give immediate access to their deposits.”
Biden also said the government regulator in charge, the FDIC, took control of Silicon Valley Bank’s assets on Friday.
However, Yellen said the government will not bail out the Silicon Valley Bank, as it did for other banks in 2008, according to a Sunday NPR article.
The FDIC provides a standard deposit insurance up
to $250,000 per depositor, per insured bank, for each account ownership category, according to its website.
“No losses will be borne by the taxpayers,” Biden said. “Instead, the money will come from the fees that banks pay into the Deposit Insurance Fund.”
Faulkner said the federal government plan is not bailing out Silicon Valley Bank.
He said, in case the customer’s deposits would exceed the standard insurance of $250,000, the government will pay them without using taxpayers’ money.
“There’s no taxpayer money, the government’s just fronting it, it’s almost like the government is going to hand it to all the depositors, and then collect it all back from the sale of the bank and any other loss from all the other banks,” Faulkner said.
The Silicon Valley Bank, which is connected to numerous startups that rely on the bank to pay their employees, generated consequences in other sectors of the Bay Area because of its failure.
SJSU linguistic junior Brandon Rodriguez is the manager of Thinker Toys, a toys store located in Morgan Hill.
Rodriguez said he expects to see “a lot less customers coming into the store.”
“You know, our customers, a lot of them work in tech,” he said. “So you know, if their companies aren’t able to pay them, then, how is it that they’re able to stay in the area and shop locally and support us as a business?”
Faulkner said although the crash will hurt companies who put money in the Silicon Valley Bank in the short-term, he doesn’t believe innovation in Silicon Valley will come to a halt.
“I don’t think innovation is going anywhere from the Bay Area,” Faulkner said. “I think this is going to be a bigger look at the banking industry than it is about the startup industry.”
Laughter, applause and cheers of support filled the Student Union Ballroom on Friday as a panel of female Silicon Valley leaders shared professional and personal stories with a large crowd.
The sixth annual Women in Leadership League Conference was held in person for the first time in four years.
San Jose State President Cynthia Teniente-Matson moderated the event.
Teniente-Matson started the panel by asking each speaker to share their journey and how they got to where they are today.
Gabrielle Capolupo works for the engineering office of the chief technology officer at Juniper Networks, a software development company.
She said she didn’t know what she wanted to do going into college, but decided to major in theater at the University of Massachusetts.
Capolupo said she loved her time in the theater department and decided to pursue a film degree in Los Angeles after obtaining her bachelor’s degree.
“I drove 3,000 miles with everything I owned in my car and drove from Boston until I hit water on the other side of the country,” Capolupo said. “When I got here, I didn’t have any money, I didn’t have a job, didn’t have a place to stay.”
Capolupo said a random job she found through a temp agency is what started the path to her current career.
She said the temp agency placed her with a networking company, and she enjoyed it so much she decided to get a master’s in business administration at SJSU.
Capolupo said after getting her master’s, she worked in engineering management for Cisco Systems, Inc., before moving on to work in the same field for Juniper Networks, where she has been for over 16 years.
Cisco is an IT and networking brand headquartered in San Jose that manufactures and sells telecommunications equipment
and networking hardware and software, according to its website.
“I had no plans, didn’t even know this kind of life existed,” Capolupo said. “I knew nothing about it and I absolutely love what I do.”
Lucia Soares, chief information officer for a global investment firm, The Carlyle Group, said she had a plan going into college that changed along the way.
She said during her undergrad at SJSU she majored in Spanish and planned to use her degree to teach literature in foreign languages.
Soares said she became set on her career path while she was on the job cleaning someone’s house.
She said her employer at the time found her to be a hard worker and a good learner, and offered her a job as a website development contractor at Fujitsu, a Japanese global information and communication technology company, according to its LinkedIn webpage.
“That one door that opened completely changed the trajectory of where I went,” Soares said.
She said she ended up enjoying the work and decided to get her master’s in business administration at SJSU.
Soares said she is very happy with where her path has taken her.
Marketing junior Julia Liu, who attended the event, said she particularly enjoyed the portion when the women told their stories.
“It was just very cool to hear their stories,” Liu said. “For a lot of them, where they ended up was very different from where they thought they were gonna end up so it was cool to hear how much they were able to climb the ladder.”
Teniente-Matson next asked the panelists how they make themselves visible in the workplace.
Monique Edmondson, senior director of employee experiences at Cisco Systems, Inc., said her advice to students is to be confident and speak up when they have something to add.
“If you don’t speak up and you just wait for someone to say ‘Well, I’d love to hear from you,’ it does not always happen,” she said. “Know that you were hired for a reason. You were hired because they want to have your personal perspective.”
Teniente-Matson wrapped up the panel by opening the floor to student questions.
Sonal Sinha, a partner at PwC Consulting, said a challenge in her career has been a lack of support, usually from people in leadership roles.
PwC Consulting is a collection of firms providing professional services, primarily consulting, to businesses in 152 countries, according to its LinkedIn page.
Sinha said support is an easy thing for people to promise, but words mean little if they are not backed up by actual resources.
“Everyone’s gonna say ‘Yes we support diversity and inclusion – yes we want more females and ethnic minorities in senior leadership positions,’ but, again,
the challenge has been to translate that into actual dollars and cents and building programs,” Sinha said.
Capolupo said her biggest challenges have been those she has inflicted on herself.
“I doubt myself, I challenge myself, I think I’m not doing well enough.” Capolupo said. “Imposter syndrome never goes away, it does not matter how old you are.”
She said although she believes she will always face challenges of self-doubt and performance anxiety, she has learned how to handle them and would give the same advice to students.
“Trust yourself, trust your gut and do what you love,” Capolupo said. “Get out of your own way. Don’t make it harder, because people are already gonna make it hard for you, you don’t have to add to that.”
LAS VEGAS — As the final buzzer sounded on Thursday afternoon, SJSU senior shooting guard Omari Moore jumped to the SJSU bench in celebration. The Spartans just defeated the University of Nevada, Reno 81-77 in overtime in the Mountain West Championship quarterfinals.
The win meant SJSU made it to the semi finals, marking the first time since 2011 the Spartans made it to a conference semi final.
“These guys are so tough and are so together… These guys just compete and believe and do all the work that comes with those things. It’s just a fun thing to be a part of,” SJSU head coach Tim Miles said.
In the regular season, the Spartans were defeated by the Wolf Pack by an average margin of 24 points.
“This is something that you definitely look forward to,” Moore said. “Winning Conference Tournament games with a chance to go to the NCAA Tournament. We have a little bit of momentum and we just gotta keep building off that.”
Moore averaged 16.5 points, 5.5 assists and 5.5 rebounds across two games at the MW Championship tournament.
He showcased his offensive repertoire in SJSU’s win over Nevada. Moore finished with 26 points, 4 rebounds, 10 assists and 2 blocks while playing every single minute of the game including overtime.
He also moved up to the sixth most career points in Spartan history at 1,273 points passing Justin Graham (1,272) and Ryan Welage (1,258).
Moore was not the only star to shine bright in the Spartans’ win over Nevada.
Senior forward Sage Tolbert
points, 6 rebounds, 2 steals and 2 blocks in his second 20-plus point game of the season.
“We look at Nevada as a really good team. The first two losses were very bad for us. In the two
games [against Nevada], I didn’t play well,” Tolbert said. “We looked at it like we owed them and now it’s the biggest moment. So, I felt like I needed to be aggressive and I let it just come to me instead of forcing it and we had a great game plan.”
With the win, the Spartans advanced to the tournament semifinals, where they faced the No. 1 seed San Diego State Aztecs.
The Spartans played the Aztecs on Jan. 28 when they got blown out 71-52 in San Diego.
Though SJSU was looking to continue its Cinderella story, San Diego State proved to be too much as they dominated in a 64-49 win.
The Aztecs came into the game dominating the Spartans from the jump.
San Diego State held SJSU to just 20 points in the first half, and the Aztecs held a 33-20 lead at halftime.
The Aztecs never lost the lead in the second half and cruised to a semifinal victory.
Moore and freshman point guard Alvaro Cardenas were held to just 11 points combined.
Sophomore forward Tibet Görener led the team in scoring coming off the bench with 15 points.
“It was good to see shots fall in. San Diego is a very gap heavy team. We are keyed on Omari. I had a couple open looks and had
to knock them down,” Görener said.
Though the Spartans’ Mountain West tournament run ended, SJSU was selected to play as No. 2 seed in the Discount Tire College Basketball Invitational, where they will face No. 15 Southern Indiana University.
The tournament is scheduled from March 18-22 and the Spartans are scheduled to face the Screaming Eagles at 12:30 p.m. PDT on Saturday at the Ocean Center in Daytona Beach, Florida.
that they were experiencing unusual symptoms in their menstruation cycles, according to a July 20, 2022 video from Vice News.
However, instead of responding to their concerns, Pincus and his research partner recorded these symptoms as psychosomatic.
I can tell you my period cramps most of the time feel equivalent to digesting a dozen Lego bricks, but I’ll probably never take painkillers despite the pain.
It doesn’t matter if it’s Tylenol or Advil, you won’t be able to convince me to take tablets for temporary relief.
Social norms, on top of the screaming pain in my uterus, are just not enough to convince me to take them.
I don’t understand why women are expected to medicate or readjust their bodies to work in a society that doesn’t adapt to their needs.
Men have the option of getting vasectomies, however it has only been recently talked about as an option of birth control – it usually falls on women to handle the consequences of sex.
Unfortunately, the gap between men and women is beyond wages and orgasms. It also exists in medical research, according to a Aug. 12, 2020 article by Berkeley News.
“When it comes to prescribing drugs, a onesize-fits-all approach, based on male-dominated clinical trials, is not working, and women are getting the short end of the stick,” said study lead author Irving Zucker, a professor emeritus of psychology and of integrative biology at UC Berkeley, in the article.
In 2021, over 8,000,000 women in America were vaccinated against COVID19, according to a Feb. 5, 2021 report from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
After they were vaccinated, many started sharing online
Kathryn Clancy, an associate professor in anthropology from the University of Illinois, made a Twitter post on Feb. 24, 2021 reporting, “I’m a week and a half out from dose 1 of Moderna, got my period maybe a day or so early, and [I] am gushing like I’m in my 20s again.”
Other women responded to her tweet and said they experienced similar symptoms.
Women were also reporting they were experiencing their period for the first time, despite already having gone through menopause, according to Vice News.
According to Vice News, medical experts and reporters wrote off women for making assumptions and false connections between the vaccine and their period symptoms.
This is not the first time doctors and scientists appeared to have minimal care for women’s health.
Before they were able to sell the abortion pill to women all across America, scientists needed to test the medication to see if the drug was safe.
In 1955, American biologist Gregory Pincus traveled to Puerto Rico to experiment with early versions of the abortion pill using human trials, according to an article from PBS.
According to the same source, the Puerto Rican women in the first trial welcomed the birth control pill as an alternative to sterilization or abortion. Many women in the community depended on other forms of birth control to limit their family size.
During the trial, women in these studies complained they were experiencing nausea, dizziness, headaches, stomach pain and vomiting.
Three women also died during the trial.
Psychosomatic disorder is a psychological condition where people experience physical symptoms without any medical explanation, according to a website from the Cleveland Clinic.
Decades later, the same women reported they were falsely informed the pills they took were meant to prevent pregnancy, according to PBS.
The women were initially told they were taking the pill to prevent pregnancy, not to have abortions.
They were also not told they were part of a clinical trial and that the pills they took could have given them potentially dangerous side effects.
Unfortunately, these experiences are technically a privilege in comparison to the medical research that was available for women before the 1990s.
Women were not allowed to be part of scientific or medical trials until 1993 because researchers were concerned that women would become less fertile after these trials, according to a Dec. 18, 2019 article by the Guardian.
Before 1993, women were excluded from medical research trials because researchers claimed their bodies were too hormonally complex to do studies on.
Women who were still able to carry a child were also kept out of medical trials because researchers were concerned they may accidentally expose pregnant women to untested drugs and risk hurting their child, according to Berkeley News.
This means before 1993, doctors in America did not have reliable research to inform their female patients.
Unfortunately, this history may have left women in our generation with some consequences.
Studies showed when men and women were given the same drug dose, the women’s
blood tests showed they had higher concentrations of the drug, according to two researchers from UC Berkeley and the University of Chicago in the same Berkeley News article.
Senior public health student Kayla Lam said it also aligns with how people with a lower body weight tend to be more sensitive to medication. In general, most women have less weight in comparison to men.
Lam also said women are more likely to have their pain disregarded in comparison to men.
“It’s common where a lot of female patients come in and they see them. It’s disregarded, most of the time,” Lam said.
Lam said during the ‘70s, black women were given thicker needles because doctor’s assumed they had a higher pain tolerance.
Medicine is also still catching up on researching the differences between men and women in certain medical conditions.
Lam said women are more likely to be misdiagnosed when they have a heart attack because of a lack of awareness in differentiating symptoms.
Lam explained the symptoms most medical professionals pay attention to are typically only expressed in men, not in women.
This means most women will either be misdiagnosed with significant conditions or ignored until it’s too late.
According to a March 25, 2017 article from Harvard, most women said their physicians misdiagnosed them with panic disorder, stress or having hypochondria after sharing similar symptoms to having a heart attack.
Lam said these problems exist beyond medical research.
She said this type of gender discrimination can be felt both in and outside the doctor’s office.
“There’s a connection between the lack of understanding that when a woman takes a medication,
for example, birth control, there are serious side effects, but it seems like most of society tends to assume that’s not the case,” Lam said.
Lam said she had a friend who went to their OB-GYN. At the doctor’s office, she learned that her previous doctor had been prescribing her a type of birth control for much longer than what is recommended by most medical professionals.
“You should not be using [type of birth control] for more than like, two, three years, but she’s been using it for eight years,” Lam said. “That’s totally malpractice.”
Lam said these types of medications come with serious side effects.
She said her friend is in the process of suing her previous doctor who prescribed her the medication.
More research and education needs to be done to help female patients gain a better understanding of their bodies.
The problem with medical research on the female body is not because scientists and doctors did not study hard enough in school.
It’s most likely because of a lack of representation of women medical professionals and stigmas against the legitimacy of women’s issues.
The majority of medical professionals are still men.
According to a report from the Associate of American Medical Colleges, 56% of medical professionals are Caucasian, while 64% are male.
This means women, especially women of color, have less voices in the medical field.
This may also connect to why stigmas around women are still prevalent in the medical field.
For generations, women have been denied care because of stigmas of how sensitive they are to pain.
According to a May 28, 2018 article from BBC, a 2015 study showed female cancer patients had to wait longer and had to experience symptoms for a longer period
of time until they received a diagnosis, in comparison to men in six out of 11 different types of cancers.
Fortunately, this is slowly changing.
For example, in 2021 female researchers Katherine Lee, a postdoctoral researcher from the University of Washington, and Clancy began researching how the COVID-19 vaccine affects a woman’s menstruation cycle, according to Vice.
Both researchers said they started to question if there was any research after they started to experience symptoms.
Lee said she started asking questions when she and a friend of hers, who coincidentally got the COVID-19 vaccine on the same day, were texting.
During their text exchange both women shared that they were experiencing new period symptoms.
After this text exchange, Lee said she reached out to Clancy, who was also experiencing new period symptoms, and decided to start doing research after other women started posting on social media reporting they were experiencing symptoms, while also criticizing the scientific community.
“It was clear that this was an emerging issue,” Clancy said. “If anyone was going to be paying attention, it was going to be us.”
Around 2021, Lee and Clancy began gathering data.
A year later, news organizations like NBC began publishing news articles reporting that new period symptoms were not made up, they were more common than what initially researchers thought.
Researchers like Lee and Clancy are an example of why women need to not only push for more research representing their bodies, but also more representations within the medical field itself.
Students came together to kick off Women’s History Month by painting a mosaic mural representing impactful women in San Jose at the Student Union on Thursday.
Women Empowerment Through Art was a workshop put on by In Solidarity in collaboration with Local Color San Jose, which included a discussion about women solidarity, empowerment and social issues.
“Local Color is a woman-powered 501.c.3 nonprofit, with the mission to build equitable opportunities to keep emerging and established artists active, employed, and engaged in San Jose, California,” according to its website.
Aminah Sheikh, speech-language pathology master’s student and program assistant for In Solidarity, said she wanted to work with local communities and empower them to work with students.
In Solidarity is a program that develops student leaders through social justice initiatives and fosters civic engagement under the César E. Chávez Community Action Center.
“I wanted to celebrate Women’s History Month and they are a woman-owned organization, so I thought it would be a good collaboration,” Sheikh said.
To bring attention to women’s empowerment, Local Color sketched a mural on 16 canvases, all six-by-six inches, each with numbered sections dedicated to a specific paint color.
“They are all going to have a small piece,” Sheikh said. “You’re not going to see the full artwork until it all comes together.”
Alumna Erin Salazar started Local Color in 2015, an artist nonprofit led by four women with a mission to build equitable pathways for artists to thrive.
“I believe very much in the power of women and a lot of times the work that women do has historically gone unseen,” Salazar said. “We can’t go back in history to retell those stories so we have to start now.”
She said people have to be
proactive in telling the impact and stories of women throughout history in order to help balance the scales.
Salazar said having one artist in the spotlight can be a “masculine” approach to creating, something she wanted to stray away from with this event.
“While it’s not like overtly girly or curly,” Salazar said. “I think things can be feminine in a holistic way without having it be one person being the star of the show.”
She said she wanted to make it a point that students held the power in this event, similar to how she felt when she was a student at SJSU.
“[Being] in the Student Union right now is wild,” Salazar said.
“Over a decade ago, when I was still a student here, this
building was under construction.”
Salazar said there was an ugly blue construction wall that wrapped around what would become the Student Union.
With the permission of her professor, she said she led a group of SJSU students to make the wall more than blue nothingness.
“It was the very first mural I had ever worked on,” Salazar said.
What were blue walls of wood a decade ago, are now self-portrait murals framed and displayed on the second floor of the Student Union near meeting rooms 5-6.
“Really, it seems like the organization started from that one mural project back here in 2009,” Salazar said.
Sheikh said the César E. Chávez
Community Action Center worked with Local Color for a student mural in fall of last year for Rooted, a social justice music and art festival.
“I saw what they did at Rooted and it looked really cool,” Sheikh said. “I wanted to do a more intimate program with them to give them more, like, creativity and the students more creativity.”
Salazar said she and her organization jumped to the opportunity to co-host the event last Thursday.
“In our mission to build these pathways for artists to thrive, [. . .] we are trying to put together opportunities for artists to lead very different types of workshops,” Salazar said. She said Local Color programs
include commissioning public art to beautify the community and fiscal sponsorships that sees Local Color leveraging their non-profit status to support grants for dozens of community organizations.
In addition, the organization works to establish affordable art studios by corroborating with developers to reactivate buildings that are scheduled for demolition
“Because of this partnership we’ve developed with the César Chávez Action Center, we are starting to lean into bringing art to people who are maybe not traditionally artists,” Salazar said. “It’s so fun, and everybody deserves to have that much fun.”
Communications freshman Saray Mendoza said the organization’s purpose to bring light to women in San Jose intrigued her to participate in the event.
“Not a lot of women get recognized for what they do,” Mendoza said. “Women are really strong and I think it goes over a lot of people’s heads.”
Mendoza said she appreciated that each canvas had numbers labeled to a color of paint.
“I wasn’t going based off of my imagination and I’m not a really good painter, but I thought it was very therapeutic,” Mendoza said.
Salazar said she is in a lucky position to be able to come back to SJSU in her paint-covered overalls and guide students with expressing themselves through art.
“It looks like a lot of friendly and bright individuals from varied backgrounds and ethnicities coming together to paint,” Salazar said. “There’s going to be a bit of flavor in the individual piece, but when it all comes together it will have a bigger impact.”
Sheikh said the mosaic mural will hopefully be displayed in the César E. Chávez Community Action Center in the Student Union by the end of next week.
San Jose State alumnus
Darren Haruo Rae, debuted his film, “Nisei,” based off of his grandfather’s diaries as a Japanese American World War II veteran, at the Hammer Theater Center on Saturday.
Rae said the word “nisei” refers to second-generation Japanese Americans.
“That means your parents immigrated to America and you
were born here,” Rae said. “My grandfather was nisei.”
Rae’s grandfather, Minoru Miyasaki, volunteered to serve in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team while his family was displaced in incarceration camps along the West Coast.
The U.S. Army’s 442nd Regimental Combat Team, which included the 100th infantry battalion, was a unit mostly comprised of Japanese Americans that served during World War II. The unit is widely regarded
as the most decorated regiment in U.S. military history, according to a Sept. 24, 2020 article by The National World War II Museum.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 on Feb. 19, 1942, which forcibly detained an estimated 120,000 Japanese American families along the West Coast, sending them to internment camps, according to The National Archives and Records Administration.
“They called them internment camps, but they really were
prisons,” Rae said. “You were ripped from your homes, locked up and weren’t allowed to leave and stripped of all your belongings and possessions.”
The short film takes place during World War II in 1944, a couple years after the incarceration of Japanese Americans.
Rae said his great-grandfather was an immigrant and was not allowed to own property.
“He was a sharecropper – he was a farmer and grew strawberries,”
Rae said. “But he wasn’t allowed
to own the land he grew the crops on.”
He said when his greatgrandfather was incarcerated, he was promised by the landowners that his crops and belongings would be cared for.
“Of course, when they came back, everything was gone,” Rae said.
Costume and weapons wrangler Francis Hamada provided all of the U.S. military uniforms and combat
Spartans, assemble!
San Jose State students competed amongst their peers in Marvel Trivia Night at the Student Union.
The friendly competition let students show off their knowledge on superheroes from the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Marvel comic books.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe films are separated in five phases currently, and viewers are encouraged to follow this order to be familiar with this shared universe based on Marvel Comics.
The game was played in a similar way to “Jeopardy!,” where students picked from different categories like MCU Movie Mania, for a certain amount of points.
Using Trivia Maker, students raced to tap their phone screens in order to answer questions. The event coordinators announced the name of the fastest student and then brought a microphone to them so they could respond.
Advertising senior and event coordinator Shanall Sneed said she chose to host Marvel Trivia Night because she’s a fan and wanted students to have a fair chance at winning.
“Marvel has been a thing since like the 40s, damn near like the 30s, so I know it’s something that has been like generational that everybody can enjoy and have fun with,” Sneed said.
Business junior Subha Khan said she heard about the event from her friend Jessica, who is a huge Marvel and comic book fan, to spend more time with her.
“I realize, I pay the money for a lot of their salaries and I pay the money for this, like my tuition pays for all of these extra stuff. So coming in here, and like, getting the snacks and using what they do, as activities, is really helpful,” Khan said.
She said she is originally a DC fan and loves the comics
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gear for “Nisei.”
“Imagine building your wealth and business, have it all taken away from you, thrown into a camp and then dumped back onto the street with a suitcase, building your institutional wealth from scratch when you’ve already done it once,” Hamada said.
Rae said his great grandfather first immigrated to Hawaii, where he worked on pineapple and sugarcane plantations before migrating to the mainland.
In response to the Pearl Harbor attacks on Dec. 7, 1941, Rae said Japanese Americans in Hawaii were eager to fight for their country, but were denied by the Department of War until the formation of the 100th Infantry Battalion in 1942. Even after having their citizenship and belongings revoked, Hamada said many Japanese Americans volunteered to fight to prove their loyalty for their home country.
“That’s kind of how my grandfather volunteered,” Rae said. “They sent a couple members from the 100th to recruit for a new regiment.”
Rae said after the 100th Infantry Battalion was sent to Europe, its success led to the government’s approval of detained Japanese Americans volunteering to fight.
“Ever since I was a little kid, anytime I had to do a book report or anything for school where I could pick the topic, I would do it on this,” Rae said. “It really made me realize how much it’s not talked about.”
He said his grandfather wouldn’t share war stories with
and characters. However, the first Marvel movie she watched, “The Avengers,” gravitated her toward this side of the fandom.
DC got its initials from the Detective Comic series, which featured Batman, a popular superhero from the DC Universe. The two franchises are often pitted against each other by fans in all aspects.
Khan said her favorite franchise in the Marvel Cinematic Universe is the “Black Panther” movie series.
She said she likes “Black Panther” because of how welldone the story and interesting the villain is.
“It’s the best Marvel movie in the sense that it kind of elevates other superhero movies with it because it’s showing that even comic book movies have substance,” Khan said.
In regards to the sequel, “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” Khan said the recent movie did a good job of exploring Shuri’s grief as she became the new Black Panther after her older brother, T’Challa, passed away.
Letitia Wright, who plays Shuri, had big shoes to fill after taking over the movie series as the lead character. This occurred after Chadwick Boseman died in 2020 because of colon cancer and Marvel also decided to rest his character.
“I think it’s going to be interesting with her being on the throne and her journey because she never wanted to and she never expected to be a ruler so I’m interested to see but I hope Marvel doesn’t mess up,” Khan said.
Mechanical engineering junior Carissa Phillips said she’s also a huge DC fan and
came to the event dressed as Harley Quinn.
Phillips said she doesn’t really watch Marvel movies but her favorite superhero from the universe is Black Widow.
She said she heard about the event on her way to grab coffee with friends.
“We saw a sign that said ‘Marvel Trivia Night’ and we were like, ‘We should go to that’ and then we did,” Phillips said.
Regarding the event’s turnout, Sneed said she wasn’t expecting anything.
“I kind of was just letting it play out,” Sneed said. “I was really excited for my event and I knew a lot of people were, I kind of heard a lot of talk about it, but you know, things happen and the weather was not that great today. There were some other factors so I wasn’t expecting too much, wasn’t trying to get my
hopes up, wasn’t trying to be like negative either.”
Sneed said events like Marvel Trivia Night are a great way to get to know other students on campus. “I’m a transfer student so when I came here, I knew nobody [and] that’s how I started meeting people, was going to events,” Sneed said. “I think it’s a great way to interact, to get to know your campus a little bit more.”
The winners of Marvel Trivia Night took home prizes like a brand new air fryer or sunset lamp, along with bragging rights, to conclude the evening.
his daughter, Rae’s mother, who would eventually hear stories of her father through her son.
“A lot of these stories my mother didn’t even know,” Rae said. “It was a cool emotional journey for us to relive his stories.”
Rae said his generation is one of the last to have a direct connection to Japanese Americans who were incarcerated and fought in World War II.
“It’s so hard for people to get invested into subjects when you don’t have a direct connection like that,” Rae said. “No one talked about the 442nd – I think in 6th grade, there was one little paragraph that mentioned it.”
He said it’s important to remind people that the U.S. wasn’t the shining beacon of light during the war that some people like to think it was.
“The story has a lot of true elements to it, but it’s more of a representation of the whole community and what they went through during the war,” Rae said. “It’s using my family’s name as a way to represent that.”
One scene from the film depicts Rae’s grandfather, Minoru Miyasaki, who, after signing up to fight, confronts his dad, causing the two of them to clash.
“You have this hierarchy of disappointing family and doing what you think is right,” Rae said. “Take out the gunshots, take out the death – it’s the family dynamic of it that’s really heartbreaking.”
Radio-television-film senior, Yolanda Ha, worked alongside other students on the production of “Nisei” during summer last year.
“We all started off as production assistants, and if we had a specific department we were more interested in, we would let Darren know of our interest,” Ha said. “We showed up everyday and put in the work to show that we were serious.”
Ha said she and her team worked to support both the lighting and camera department while on set.
“When I did the summer program, we had outside professionals come and talk to students,” Rae said. “I had to remind myself and made a point to give these students as much understanding of what goes into filmmaking.”
He said one important takeaway for students was to understand that directing and producing a film is a team sport that involves the passion of everyone involved.
“When the project finished, all of a sudden all of these student shorts started popping up,” Rae said. “Students that didn’t know anything at all before the shoot were leading teams to make projects – if I wanted to get anything out of [“Nisei”], it was that.”
