UCSC
Dear friends,

Some of you might know that I applied to transfer to UC Berkeley for the upcoming school year. It is with mixed feelings that I relay the news that I was accepted. Rather, it is with bittersweet saliva that I relay the news that I will be accepting their offer of admission. I can’t leave Santa Cruz without fully explaining everything firing and sparking in the dome.

I don’t want this letter to sound like I’m being pompous in any way, like I feel I’m so important that I have to write a letter to everyone. I (would like to) think at least some of you want to know why I’m peacing, and I feel that it would be unfair of me not to fully explain myself.

There are a few prominent reasons I have decided to leave all the green, comfortable beauty of Santa Cruz for the gray streets of Berkeley. First and most trivially is the number of classes at UC Berkeley. Shit, they have 3,000 classes to choose from. I can learn anything I want to learn.

Secondly, Berkeley’s math department is second, in our country, only to Princeton. I am a math major, and I intend to go to grad school, do postdoctoral study, and eventually become a math professor. Of course, I could still do all of this if I were to stay at UCSC, but what draws me to Berkeley is that, with a B.A. from there, I will presumably have more freedom of choice in graduate school and therefore more choice in where I may get a professorship. I don’t want to teach at a prestigious university. I just want to have an adequate amount of choice in where I will get to teach later. A greater freedom in choice of job is worth (slightly) more in the long run than an extra two years at UCSC, and there are very, very few things that I would choose over spending the next two years here with you.

A third reason I am leaving for UC Berkeley is because I feel that I am growing too comfortable here. I want to test the waters outside our pillow weed city, the world of spikes and businessmen. I never want to stop challenging myself. Going to Berkeley itself, that is, the city and not the university, will be a challenge in itself, perhaps greater than the challenge of shifting from UCSC to Cal. Many of you have been to Berkeley. I don’t need to tell you how different it is from Santa Cruz. I want to make sure that I can still work a place in an urban society, not so I will later in life, necessarily. Just so I can. I worry that Santa Cruz is far too unique for me to be able to apply the lessons I have learned here in whatever town I may reside.

At this point in my life, Santa Cruz is the best place I can imagine living. The vibe in Santa Cruz encourages one to live out their instinct and innermost identity as fully as possible. No matter how crazy that instinct may seem. Everyone else is just as weird. This power of Santa Cruz is awesome enough considering the effect it has had on my own personal identity (and how I can “express” it, for lack of a better word), but this infinitely comfortable pervading vibe leads to tons of truly unique, irreplaceable people, blasting their own identity however loudly they fucking feel like. I love so many things about the people in general here, let alone those that I call my friends. By far the strongest weight pulling to keep me in SC is the friends I love that I won’t get to see every day.

So what I most want to stress with this open letter is that it is not a goodbye or a parting of paths. You’d better believe I’m going to come down here every fucking time I have a free weekend. I can’t imagine that I would miss you any less than that. There are volumes I could fill with my admiration for each of you. I’m in the process of trying. Seriously, I am.

I have no idea how things are going to work out in Berkeley, but I am absolutely certain that the relationships I will have with people there will be far, far different from those I have here. These past two years have easily been the best years of my life thanks to all of you (and, to a much lesser extent, the forest). It’s cliché, but I will not ever forget you.

I really hope some of you end up staying together after graduating, that is, moving en masse to some rad place that I can live, too, because sharing lives with all of you breeds paradise. I’m gonna miss the fucking burritos, too. The burritos suck in Berkeley.

Love,
Mose