If there’s one thing that UC Berkeley has taught me the most about, it’s communication. And when there’s no one to hold your hand through the trials generously supplied by campus, sometimes you have no choice but to fall back on your own voice.
I’ve made progress toward being less jittery about confrontation and more sensitive to compromise — developments that I owe to everything I’ve encountered here in Berkeley. The Haas School of Business promises us that if you communicate effectively, your perspective and point should be crystal clear, even to someone you just met.
As I watched Berkeley sculpt me into a communicator, there was one place where I hit a snag. That place, The Daily Californian, is structured in a way that is unquestionably effective at strengthening internal relationships but is harshly unforgiving to what lies beyond its Northside office walls. Especially during my senior year, there was a very precise line between people inside and outside the paper. It was a distinction that came with a reality check — the people who could make sense of my Daily Cal experiences were a finite few. It’s the kind of group in which the tears we’ve shed from office pressure have lost their novelty — breaking down comes with no surprise, no questions, just immediate movement to comfort the person who needs it.
The office’s obscure and unrelatable infrastructure is at the heart of why it’s so hard for me to talk about this publication. There are the absurd theatrics, such as advertising to anyone who’ll listen that you’re about to start your seventh meeting of the day or knowing that you’ll be in the office so frequently that you decide to bring in a 50-pack of knockoff Yakults.
But fundamentally, as an outsider, there is the jargon you’ll never recognize, the processes you’ll never witness and the rules you’ll never have to abide by. There are so many delicate and often contradictory nuances — such as the whiplash you get from an arduously long but also unforgivingly rapid production cycle — that I constantly wish I had a more straightforward way to explain.
Don’t get me wrong, these things only insiders are privy to drive home my sense of belonging in an office that took four enduring semesters to finally feel comfortable in. The roundabout remark that there are worse things you’ve seen, the jokes about the “look inside” that flew too close to the sun, the faint sound of “Le Festin” that echoed from the media room — these all became familiar currency. Euclid Avenue held memories of tongue twisters at Greek restaurants and burning hot shovels in tortilla chip dispensers. But despite all of this, the trade-off was that communicating my Daily Cal triumphs and woes to anyone on the outside proved to be a nearly impossible task.
For someone whose biggest fear is being misunderstood, that was terrifying. There have been countless times when others have mistakenly assumed that I write articles for the Daily Cal. And even the people that knew with certainty I was not a writer still struggled to explain what I did instead. In my efforts to clarify, it never seemed like I did a very compelling job. Maybe it was me not being able to find the right words or others not being able to grasp it without years of context, but I’m convinced that it’s some equilibrium between the two. The nature of my work was elusive — not because I was being secretive but because it was veiled behind incomprehensibility.
I’ve come to the realization that working at the Daily Cal is very fulfilling, yet very isolating.
There’s probably some brilliant solution to remedy all of this, one in which I can somehow communicate the incommunicable and alleviate the isolation. In the meantime, though, I have accepted that there are many things we elect to forgo in order to have the privilege of doing this job. It’s not really about your feelings or your struggles or your stardom; it’s about getting the paper out. When it gets tough, you take a lap to the corner store, passing all the dark and empty cafés that closed hours ago. And then you get back to work, because if we miss that 2 a.m. deadline, nothing else matters.
I ended high school with a love letter to room H53, and I’m ending college with one to 2483 Hearst Ave. There are so many things that run true in any publication, but the Daily Cal has surpassed the others in teaching me how to balance the needs of the paper with my own. For any given emotion I have felt for this place, I was resentful that I couldn’t convey it to the world. But the fact that the paper’s needs always took precedence over my personal wallowing required me to constantly recalibrate my priorities. It taught me how to get over myself. And, actually, that it’s not always about endless, noble self-sacrifice, but rather about finding little windows within the chaos of duty to care for the individuals that make up the paper.
So I walk away from college with people in mind for whom I have more love than I could ever express. And while I have to concede that the Daily Cal cannot be forever, the brilliance of the paper’s impact will shine for a long, long time before it fades.
It’s been a while since the start of my term, and it wasn’t until it ended that I’ve been able to put this feeling into words. This inside-outside divide, though complicated and infuriating, builds an organic unity within the paper. I’m glad we all take care of one another because sometimes, there’s no one else who can.
Kaitlan Tseng was the 2019-20 creative director. She joined The Daily Californian in fall 2017 as a layout designer and was design editor in summer and fall 2018. She is graduating with a bachelor’s degree in business administration.