Co-op day-ze....

(Summer 2003, Ridge House)

It's been a little over 2 months since I've left the Berkeley Student Cooperative system (formerly the USCA), that was my Berkeley home for over 5 years (with one gap year in between).

Now living as an urban nomad (aka subletter) I'm coming to terms with how much the co-op system did to help me feel at home in the Bay Area. As a nervous college student leaving my parents SoCal ranch for the "great hippie joint" to the North, I wasn't very prepared for adjusting to Bay Area life. Nobody in my immediate family or friend circle had ever moved away from home to go to college (...of those few who had gone to college). Dorm-life wasn't an experience that my mother could explain to me, and 12-years of "taking care of animals before school work" had definitely left me ill-prepared for the academic feeding frenzy known as U.C. Berkeley.

The best I could do was take some fashion advice from my model/suburbanite best friend Kellie, and hope to god that 2-years of community college and vocational upbringing had some useful relevance in the Bay Area.

I hit a lot of speed bumps, both academically and socially, those first few years at Cal. Mercifully, in my very first semester, I fell into a co-op household of people who were as kind as they were forgiving for my shortcomings (aka Ridge House). After that first semester at Ridge, I knew that as long as I was a student at Cal, I would remain in the co-op's. It was my main way of making friends and picking up the "outside-of-class" information you need to know to survive college-- and Cal in particular (for example: I couldn't afford to travel up for formal first-year orientation, so my Ridge housemates showed me how to use the college email/library accounts...which I would've never figured out without them).

Of course, not every co-op I lived in turned out to be as great as Ridge (namely the graduate co-op, the Convent, was my most negative co-op experience). However, I did take away something from each co-op I tried (and in total, I tried 3 houses and 2 apartments). I also picked up management roles towards the end (including Board Rep, Waste Mgr, and Secretary).

The co-op's and their residents taught me more then I could possibly express in a brief blog. It was Cal and the promise of an elite education that made my journey to the Bay Area necessary, however it was the co-op's that made the stay in the Bay Area worthwhile and rewarding.

For all you did, BSC: Thank you.