Greetings and welcome to this edition of Campus Conversations. I'm Dan Moguloff from the Campus Office of Communications and Public Affairs. Today, it's my pleasure to be joined by our Vice Provost for Graduate Studies and the Dean of the Graduate Division, Lisa Garcia-Badoia, and our Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, Oliver O'Reilly. Before we dive into today's discussion, just a few brief biographical words about our guests. In addition to her Vice Provost role, Lisa Garcia-Badoia is a professor in our School of Education, where she uses the tools of social science to reveal the causes of educational and political inequalities. She's published six books, earning five National Book Awards. Lisa has consulted for presidential campaigns and statewide ballot efforts and has partnered with over a dozen community organizations working to empower low-income communities of color. Vice Provost Oliver M. O'Reilly is a professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and this, believe it or not, is his 31st year as a faculty member. He is also the faculty athletics representative for the campus. His research and teaching feature a wide range of problems in the dynamics of mechanical systems, ranging from, wait for it, spaghetti strands, squealing brakes, motorcycle navigation systems, and shoelaces. Oliver was formerly Chair of the Academic Senate and received the Distinguished Teaching Award in 1999. And as always, we welcome your questions throughout the conversation today, just post them to our Facebook Live site and we'll do our best to get to them as we proceed. Oliver and Lisa, thanks so much for being here today. Thanks, Dan. Thanks, Dan. Lisa, let me start with you. I mean, how long have you been in your role and talk to us a little bit about what it's like to make that shift across over that line from a member of faculty to also a member of the campus administration? Thanks, Dan. So I've been in this role since July 2019. I've been a faculty member at Berkeley since 2008. And if people can remember back to 2019, that was the fall of power shutoffs, wildfires. Then we had the wildcat strike that December. Then we had pandemic shutdown in March and racial reckoning in June. And so it was quite a transition in the sense of seeing every possible thing that could go wrong, I guess, on campus, short of locusts. And it was exciting, though, to be in community with a group of people who were really focused on how to take care of our students and how to make sure this incredible institution kept going in the face of all of these great challenges. And so it was a bit of a wild ride, but it's a privilege to have the opportunity to have that systemic and structural impact on how the university works and how it moves forward in its public mission. Anything that surprised you along the way when you think back about what your expectations were going into this role and what reality has served up? I've been surprised how much I like it, I guess. I think of all the times that I've been on campus and wondered, you know, why do we do things this way? And it's been so gratifying to be able to be in a position to say, can we stop doing it that way and have that work? I've also just been really impressed at how much our leadership care about our students and care about the well-being of staff, faculty and students on campus. And so feeling good about the people that I work with has also been not surprising, but it's been nice that it's worked out that way. Yeah, Oliver, same for you. What, how long have you been in office? Remind us in your Vice Provost role and what have you learned? What surprised you along the way as you made that shift? Yeah, so I served as the interim since July 2020, feels like forever ago, July 2021. And then I was appointed to the permanent VPUE in July 2022. So the transition has been, it's been very interesting in terms of spending a year sort of in a caretaker role and seeing the issues, seeing the challenges, seeing the opportunities. And then getting to think about them as you interview for the position and really start to refine them. There's nothing like going through an interview process to do that to you. And so that's been a great, that was been actually a very good process. And I've actually, and just like Lisa said, I really love my job and I really enjoy it. I was fortunate to be this chair of the Senate at the start of the pandemic. So that helped me immeasurably in this current role because I made a lot of connections with people because we all had to, the scale of the challenges were just so immense that we all had, everybody had to work together. And it was really an inspiring group of people to work with. And the care that people had for faculty, staff and students in all the meetings was really, it was inspiring. And then the connections I made with people were just very, very helpful when I started as an interim. Prior to that, I was a faculty member and I did a service over the past 27 years as faculty member before that. So I sort of got some idea of how complicated the system was but really I had no idea till I became, till I was Senate chair and we had to sort of take everything apart and build it back together again. That's when I realized just how complicated the university is and how it takes everybody working together to make it work. You know, the students, undergraduates and graduate students have to work together in partnership with the faculty, with the administration, department chairs, deans, alumni, prospective students. The whole thing has to sort of work together in this really, when it's working together in a synergistic way, it's really amazing. And I feel the campus has done that despite all the challenges, you know, the wildfires, the pandemic, the power outages, social justice, movements and awareness, some difficult elections. We've sort of, we've really batted above our average, I feel in a way that makes me proud to be here. And so I think the public, the fact that we're a public institution doing batting above our average the way we are and helping so many students is really, I find it just remarkable and very inspiring. Yeah, wow. And I'm also noting your use of sports metaphors and don't worry, I will ask you about your role as faculty athletics representative.  And there's all this talk out there in the workplace about the new normal and about changes. What do you think, what changes have you noticed? And do you see the beginnings of a new normal in so far as the graduate student experience and role is on our campus? What's the pandemic done? What changes is it gonna leave in its wake? That's a really good question that I think is still in process. I think the most important thing, the pandemic demonstrated was the profound inequities that existed on campus in terms of students' ability to navigate their time at Berkeley emotionally, financially, academically and all of that. And so I think the fissures that were already there just got a little wider during the pandemic. And the good news is, I think we developed a lot of new muscles to help support students. And so basic needs did a tremendous job. There was great coordination between my staff and their staff and other staff in equity inclusion and student affairs who really just got together to try to figure out how do we support students in distress in ways that we hadn't seen in the past? But we're in some ways byproducts of what was already there. I think we're in a transitional moment right now and I'm not sure anyone knows where we're going to land. What keeps me up at night is that I think the ways in which students presented into stress has changed as a result of the pandemic. And so I'm not sure we'll know, especially with graduate students, it's easy for them to just sort of fall off the radar to not come to campus. And so making sure that our students are well and moving forward, I think is a big challenge that we're trying to address. I think also there seems to be an anecdotal evidence that there was some, I think that was, we all went through some sort of existential crisis over the last few years of really rethinking how we're spending our time, what we're doing with our lives, wanting to feel like what we're doing is meaningful. And a number of students have left our programs. And so it's all still shaking out a little bit. The students who were close to finishing finished. It's really those ones that were in the middle of their programs that I worry about and that I think it's going to take a number of years for us to really understand what this moment has meant for us as a society and as a campus, psychologically, emotionally and professionally. And so we're just trying to do our best to help people get through these bumps in the road. But I think the impacts are going to be longstanding. And I would hope that all of us will be more compassionate with ourselves and with one another. And that the students who went through this as they go into the professoria will be better able to support and be flexible with their students. And so I would like to think that the academy will shift as a result of this. But I think we're still in those early days and the ultimate outcomes are still not entirely clear. So when you say the academy will shift, are you talking to be about being more compassionate, more financially supportive, all of the above? What do you mean by that the academy will shift? I think there has been more curricular innovation on this campus over the last three years than probably has happened at least during my time here and maybe decades before that, right? Faculty were really forced and graduate student instructors and lecturers and everyone really forced to pivot in terms of their courses on a dime, right? Literally from one day to the next. And what that did though was introduce people to new tools. People had to really think about ways to use technology perhaps that they hadn't had the opportunity to do before. And so I think our teaching is better because we, I know a lot of faculty are using flip classroom as an example, really thinking about what the classroom experience had to maximize that interaction and maybe deliver content asynchronously in different kinds of ways. I think thinking about assessment more deeply, how is it? What is it that we want students to learn? How do we know whether they've learned it? What are the different ways that they can demonstrate that knowledge? Being more aware of psychological distress and its impact on academics. I think we already knew that, but reached a whole other level during the pandemic. And I would hope all of that means that we just have a much more student-centered approach to education that our classrooms are much more supportive, exciting, interactive, and engaging. And that we move forward with a bigger toolkit in terms of what we offer to students and the ways in which we can impart knowledge to students that really takes into consideration that they're coming from different places. They have different needs. They have different learning styles. And that it's our job as faculty to make sure that we're able to educate everyone regardless of those differences. Wow, a lot to chew on in that answer. Amazing. Oliver, same question for you. What do you think, what changes have you seen as a result of the pandemic? Which do you think are lasting? What's the impact been? Justin, I know we're still in the middle of it and times early, but when you step back, what do you think of in that regard? So I think there's, well, just to add to what Lisa said, I think there's much more of an emphasis now on engagement, on deliberate engagement of students and making classrooms more inclusive in a way that we didn't really think about it before the pandemic. I also think we're much more thoughtful about our online tools that we're using. I think one of the big things that's come out of the pandemic is that there's no longer this clarion cry for online everything, online education, that people have seen that just simply putting material online and expecting everyone to learn is not effective and it just doesn't work. That online education actually is far more expensive than people imagined. It needs far greater curricular development, pedagogy. It needs to be very thoughtfully done so you have engagement with students so you're ensuring they're learning. But I also think that part of one of the things about the pandemic that I think is positive is that we've appreciated each other. We've appreciated being around each other in ways that we maybe took for granted before. Being in meetings, in-person meetings where you see six conversations happening at the same time, well, that's what's happening in classrooms in person as well. You're seeing students engage with each other, engage with the instructor in ways that are just much more difficult to do on Zoom and remotely. I do think I agree with Lisa that we don't really know fully what's happened, the full consequences of the pandemic on learning. I was reading last night that a new $3 million grant was given to a faculty member in the Graduate School of Education here working with the California Department of Public Education and UCSD to try and understand what's happened in K through 12 during the pandemic. And yes, it has exacerbated a lot of inequalities. And so we're going to see that in our incoming students for the foreseeable future. And so I think it's up to us now to figure out what can we do to help the students who are coming in onto campus, and how can we support instructors so that some of the positive momentum that's happened with curricular innovation and changes in how we teach, more increasing flipped classrooms, for example, how can we keep that momentum going so that we really achieve this transformation. And when I first started here on the Berkeley campus 30 years ago, teaching meant just being able to under knowing all the technical aspects of the course so you could answer questions from students in multiple ways. Now it's much more, we also expect people to have inclusive classrooms. We expect people to engage with students. We expect different types of assessment. We expect accommodations, et cetera. It's much more complicated. So building this infrastructure to support instructors with that I think is also something that's coming out of the pandemic that we have to do and we have to be more deliberate about it. And that's exciting. Yeah, I'm going to follow up. Lisa, I want to ask you about this issue of how we support students, particularly in the context you've been talking about this increased awareness of the extent to which students are distressed. But before I do, Oliver, I want to follow up on something you mentioned. And that was K through 12. What do you see what's coming our way? Unpack that a little bit. I mean, obviously that's where all of our undergraduates come from. What's changing in the K through 12 world? So what we're hearing in the K through 12 world is that the pandemic has adversely affected students from historically excluded communities in the public schools. You mean disproportionately? Proportionately, yeah. We're also, from talking to instructors of first year courses, we're finding that they're spending more time focused on teaching and pedagogy. But they're also noticing that the students are not as prepared as they were previously. We're noticing a reduction in the number of students who've taken AP classes in high school. It's also, I think it's probably a little more difficult to gauge where the students' grades are because we no longer require standardized testing. And for whatever the issues with standardized testing, at least it gave us a second metric for how schools graded and how schools performed that we don't have anymore. One of the things that from talking to instructors that has that I think we have to find a way of addressing and Lisa mentioned this earlier is students come to class, then they stop attending, then they listen to the lectures online, and then they stop listening to the lectures online. So we lose touch with these students. And in structures of that, it's just really hard to try and get them back. And it's possible this happened prior to the pandemic as well. But we didn't notice it because we didn't have all this technology that we can use to track if students are engaging in our classrooms. But I also feel because we've got that technology, we owe it to our students to try and find them and bring them back. So that's one thing that I've spent a lot of time thinking about and trying to find ways that we can deliberately engage and keep that engagement I think is going to be very important. That's both sobering and fascinating. Lisa, before I come back to you, just for those of you who joined us late, welcome to campus conversations and just a reminder that we welcome your questions. And they can be posted to our Facebook Live site. So Lisa, given all this, it's just almost a natural segue into something that I know you wanted to talk about. And that was how we're looking now holistically at student support. Talk to us a little bit about what that means programmatically and attitudinally. Yeah, thank you. Thank you for that. That's what we're really trying to do in graduate division is provide holistic support around students. And what we mean by that is really seeing students as whole people appreciating that there are things that happen in your personal life, in your family life, in other ways that can influence your performance academically. I think especially in graduate school, just speaking from my own graduate student experience, I used to joke that I saw myself as a brain on a stick, that no one really cared about me, what mattered was what I produced intellectually and that was it. And that just doesn't work for our students. And I think it's not, the reality is you can't produce good research, you can't do good academic work if you're not well and centered as a person or if your family is in crisis. And so appreciating that students come to us with very different life experiences, the more we diversify our student populations, the more diverse their needs are going to be. We have student parents who have certain kinds of struggles during COVID in terms of childcare, depending on the age of their children. Or you have folks who have family members who are chronically ill or who sadly passed away during the pandemic. Or you have cultural differences for our international students who come into our classrooms and who may not necessarily understand that unwritten curriculum of how people are supposed to engage with one another. And so what we're trying to do is build different kinds of spaces on campus where students can find community, where students can get that information where we can be transparent about expectations, what mentorship should look like, what advising should look like, so that everyone has a level playing field in terms of their information and understanding of how the system works, what's expected of them, what they can expect from faculty, and to know that they can find community rock climbing or they can find community around their affinity group or they can find community in other kinds of spaces on campus both in their department and outside to try to really address the fact that we are whole people and that you need to have that balance and that well-being at the center in order to fully take advantage of campus and fully take advantage of your potential, whatever that might be. And it's your emphasis regarding the importance and the value of community. Is that a function of Berkeley's size or is that something that you think is, should and must be an inherent part of all quality education? Particularly on the graduate student level? Personally, I think we learn, we are social beings, we learn in community. So I actually think that that's core to all educational spaces to be successful. I think it's especially challenging at Berkeley because of our scale and that graduate students sometimes tend to get very isolated in their departments and so that's why community becomes a challenge because for example, if you are another represented student you may be the only one or one of two in your department and that can feel very isolating, but the fact of the matter is Berkeley has over 800 underrepresented opera students as an example on campus. We actually do have a critical mass of folks who might have shared life experiences with that student who's on their own in their department. And so helping them find that community, helping them find those other individuals or if what it is, it's just feeling like I really like music and I like to sing and that's something that's important to me and being able to find another set of people who can do that. The problem with Berkeley is that its scale is both its strength and its weakness, right? The beauty of this place is you can find somebody on this campus interested in anything that you could possibly think of, but the hard part is finding them. And so we're just trying to facilitate those connections so that people can have multiple spaces where they can explore different aspects of themselves and not feel like it's just this one thing, it's all about my research, it's about my professional future, it's about this small group of people that I happen to be in my program with, but instead take advantage of the full breadth and depth of the university. So you were, Lisa, you were talking before about this holistic approach wanting to increase or enhance the extent to which we support graduate students holistically. In my experience, anything new on campus comes with a price tag. So is this something that is a priority for the ongoing philanthropic campaign? How are we aligning our resources with the priorities you've been talking about? That is an excellent question, Dan, since resources are always a challenge in our public institution. I would say that what I've learned is that resources matter, obviously, but intentionality is also really important. And the fact of the matter is there are amazing things happening across this whole campus and often the difficulty is just knowing about all of them. And so part of it is just having that North Star as a leader and really articulating that this is the goal, this is where we wanna be, this is the direction we wanna go and ask people to join in. And what I've learned is that with pretty minimal resources, I invested one and a half million dollars in our graduate diversity pilot program in the scheme of our university budget, not a whole lot of money to fund nine departments to do climate work in relative to their particular community, what their community needs. And I think that work has amplified exponentially in terms of other ideas that have come out of that that we've then been able to implement within graduate division. So I think it's about strategic investment, but I think more than anything, it's about that intentionality of being able to articulate a vision that people can join in with and that then they can move their votes in the same direction. So you're all rowing together instead of having a bunch of different separate votes doing their own thing. And that our job as academic leadership, I think is to just help people see how they can work together, make those connections, convene folks, make it easy for people to do the work that they wanna do. And once you multiply that across all the different spaces on campus, real change and real movement can happen in a relatively short period of time. Yeah. Oliver, what's front and center for you?  I mean, Lisa talked eloquently about this need to look and sort of holistic support. You know, what's front and center for her? What about you? So there's a, I would say, access and accessibility is front and center for me. What does that mean? So I really want the campus to be more accessible to students. So what I would like is my vision is that we, you know, prospective students can see themselves in students on our campus and they can also see themselves in the alums. They can see different pathways to the campus for themselves. They can see the access to all of these different programs but they can see them in a very easy way. Our campus, like as Lisa pointed out, you know, the strength is that it has all these different opportunities but it's not very transparent. And that's really our weakness is that as a campus, we can be very opaque. For instance, I've been here 31 years. There isn't a day that goes by that I don't learn something new about the campus. Now that's great. That's the strength of the campus but some things it shouldn't have taken me 31 years to figure out. And if I'm that feel that way, how does it feel for a first year student? So there are several things we're doing to help with that. One is we're going to bring in a new curriculum management system that will help make advisors give advisors an easier job of advising students. So it will help advisors help students. It will also help instructors advertise their courses and make just the curriculum more manageable. We've got 6,000 courses per semester on this campus which is just stunning. And there's courses in every subject and we have this amazing comprehensive excellence but this management system, even though it's a technical solution will help to make that more transparent. I'm also working to convene all the 80, there's 80 different academic support groups on campus. What? Yeah, 80, yeah. See, you learned something new today too. Yeah, give us an example of what an academic support unit is. Biology scholars program, data science program, data science scholars program, Cal nerds, Amgen scholars. And what's the common denominators when you say, yeah. They all provide academic support for students. Or a particular community or different things, different times? Different things, different times. So for instance, the biology scholars program provides support for students who are interested in pursuing careers in the medical field. Got it. And it provides a community, it provides mentoring, research experience, curricular help tutoring. And it's really a village on our campus and it's celebrating its 30th year this year. It's a model for all these different programs. But what we wanna do is to bring all of these programs together for the first time so that we can hear from them what we need, what support we can provide to them to amplify their work and also to make their work more visible to the outside community, especially to prospective students to start changing the narrative of Berkeley not just being this place with these 6,000 courses, some of whom have 2,000 plus students, but also a place where you've got all of this support. And then in turn finding out from the support groups how we can better coordinate, how we can better communicate and how we can reach out to foundations to get more support for these groups. So I think the other piece about accessibility is accessibility and accommodations for students needing who are with the Disabled Students Program on our campus. And so one of the things during the pandemic is the number of students in the program has doubled. So it was about 2,500 before the pandemic. It's now nearly 5,000 students. Wait, just hold on a second. I wanna make sure I understand this. So the number of students enrolled in our Disabled Students Program has doubled? Yeah, and this is not just specific to Berkeley. That's where I was going. Yeah, this is a nationwide phenomenon. Wow. Yeah, and many schools are struggling, many schools are just struggling with this demand. It touches all different areas of our campus. And so one of the things we're working to do is to basically improve teaching for instructing, instruction for instructors so they can more easily accommodate students. We've also instigated a program called the DSP faculty liaisons. So right now we have two faculty liaisons and these two faculty, Jonah Levy and Justin Davidson serve to, they serve as liaisons between departments and the DSP program. And we're looking to expand that program because it's been in place for about a year now and it's been very successful. And many departments have used Jonah and Justin to help navigate this area. But ultimately, if we can improve the way we teach instructors how to teach, then we can make a lot of issues about accommodating students. We can bake that in to the curriculum. So it does not, and the pedagogy, so it does not become this pressure point that it is right now for instructors. And that's, if I leave Berkeley in this position, having done that, I will be really happy. I think it wouldn't be the only one. You know, Lisa, diversity has been both an explicit and implicit part of a lot of what you and Oliver have been talking about. And the chancellor and other campus leaders have been clear about their dedication and commitment to enhancing the diversity of the student population, faculty and staff for that matter as well. And in this instance, I just wanna ask you recently in the wake of the recent Supreme Court ruling regarding affirmative action, I noted that one of the justices, who we will not name for the time being, said he didn't understand what diversity meant and didn't see how it could possibly have anything to do in terms of quality of education, what the educational benefits are. And so obviously as a public institution, we need and wanna represent the state we serve, but on an educational level, on a pedagogical level, what's the argument that you make? What's the value that you see in diversity? Thank you for that. I wanted to start though by saying an important thing we haven't talked about in terms of leadership on this campus is the importance of partnering with all different entities. So I wanna make sure it's clear that the work that we're doing has been in partnership with Equity and Inclusion and Student Affairs and all of us talking about the Office of Faculty Education Equity and Welfare has been instrumental. But in terms of diversity, I think it's important to say our job is to educate and to produce knowledge. And obviously there's a dialectical relationship between the two because that knowledge then becomes part of the educational process. And so I would argue that we cannot produce the knowledge that we need to produce to solve society's great problems without taking advantage of the full scope of humanity. And I'm gonna give two examples of what I mean by that. The first is just asking what questions we're not asking. In the 1880s, scholars discovered the remains of Viking and this was the foundation of much of the study of Viking history moving forward. Those who discovered the body assumed it was a powerful warrior because they were buried with the casual weapons. Two horses had been sacrificed and buried with them. An elaborate game set, including the boards and pieces that looked much like chess sat on the corpse's lap and suggested that they had been involved in strategy and planning of war. And it was simply assumed that this person was male. And again, this is the foundation for our study of Viking history moving forward. And a few years ago, two female anthropologists looked at the bones and said, huh, this perhaps is a woman. And it ends up that it in fact was a female and you can imagine how different our understanding of Viking society might have been if we had asked that question in the beginning. And it was just not something that anyone in the room got to ask because no one had a set of lived experiences that would have led them to ask that question. The other example I wanna give is an astrophysicist named Wanda the S. Merced. She was in graduate school when she began to lose her sight. And anyone who's watched the show The Big Bang Theory and seen the character Raj do his work as an astrophysicist knows that in astrophysics, you tend to look at screens and monitor the universe visually. And so she knew that she could not move forward in her career without sight. And what she realized was that the light curves that she could no longer see could actually be translated into sound. And so what she developed over the course of her career is a set of sounds to associate with all of those celestial bodies that the other astrophysicists were looking at. And she can actually detect things in the universe that the sighted astrophysicists cannot. And to just understand that we have a very specific way in the academy that we produce knowledge, that we understand things that we expect people's brains to work. And that perhaps there are many things as we see with Dr. the S. Merced that perhaps we're not seeing because we are limited in the type of people that we have in our labs and in our classrooms. And so I would argue that Berkeley cannot fulfill its true public mission and be the engine both for education and knowledge production that it should be if we don't take advantage of the full scope of human capacity in our classrooms, in our labs and in our research efforts. Thanks for that. Oliver, how does it look from where you sit in terms of our undergraduate population and the benefits of a more diverse student population also the challenges we face given our current demographic making? I think it's essential that the student, the demographics of the student body are represented in the state of California. I think there's no way to justify it being otherwise. And also, I think it we fail as a public institution if we don't achieve that. It's also good for the ideas thinking outside the box that we normally do. I think it's really comfortable for people to think that they can talk to people who are like themselves. I remember when I first started as a professor it took me a long time to realize that it's not the students' talents that I had that they shared. That wasn't what made things work. It was the ones that they had that I didn't have and vice versa. And the perspective you gain by that is extraordinary. And so for us, the fact that you have students from all over the state of California and international students and other state students coming here in what is a melting pot of cultures, civilizations, thoughts, that's extraordinary. And if the diversity does not represent the state of California, then we're not gonna get what we could get out of it. And the students are not gonna get the education that they should get out of it either. Because part of coming to campus and part of being a student is not the things that happen in the classroom. It's the things that happen outside the classroom. And it's also the engagements faculty have outside the classroom in office hours, talking to student groups, hearing students, concerns, perspectives. That affects faculty just as much as it affects students. I think it's very, if you look at faculty and their journey through their careers at Berkeley, they're affected by the students in profound ways in ways that we don't really think about. There's ways they think about life, the way they think about society, that's really affected by our students and how we engage with our students. The journey, the other way is emphasized a lot what students learn from faculty, but I think there is also this huge, huge influence that students have on faculty. The types of research they do, how they engage, how they teach, what inspires them, what makes them think about the world. And I think we saw some of that during the pandemic when things were called out that we hadn't really called out explicitly before. Challenges students faced because of their living circumstances, that we could not expect that everyone has internet connection. We could not expect that everyone has a place, quiet place that they can go to do an exam. And we have to work around that. And in the course of working around that, we come up with all these other solutions and all these other strategies that ultimately made us all move forward as a campus as well. You know, I wanna pick up on something that the word has popped up a few times in the course of your answers and that word's engagement. And I'd like you to unpack what you mean by that because when I think about engagement, just thinking back on my own collegiate career was questions and answers during a lecture in the classroom and office hours. Mm-hmm. Does it mean something different these days? I think it can be much richer these days because you can have office hours where the person doesn't have to come to your office. You can have them remotely now. You can engage with students by email. You can engage students by letters. You can engage them in the, we're much more thoughtful and deliberate about this type of engagement than we were before. Like calling office hours, office hours rather than just chat hours or get together hours. I feel that we're much more thoughtful about that. We also, students need more support from us in ways that are different. So one of the amazing things about Berkeley is how many of our students go onto graduate school. You know, it's remarkable. Some of our programs have the highest number of like a geography, mechanical engineering have the highest number of students who go on to PhD programs in the country. Wow. Now, in order for them to do that, they need letters of recommendations from instructors. So that means instructors needs to sit down with them and figure out like, where are you applying? How can I help? How do I engage that way? So that didn't happen a few years ago. Now it's much more. We're seeing many more students going to graduate school. We're seeing many more engagements of this type.  There's nothing like, yeah, I know you have a different name for it, but it's, you know, that thing you feel around campus when you're engaging with students and that energy you get from them and hearing their stories and just feeling inspired by what they're doing and where they're going and where they've come from. And I think there's something about being on campus that brings, that's just different than really special and that we didn't have two years ago because no one, there were very few people on campus and it felt totally empty. But feeling that now again and just, there's a, it's extraordinary how energizing it is. I have a question I want to post both of you from somebody in the audience. But before I do that, I wanted to remind everybody, including folks who joined us late, that if you do have questions for Oliver or Lisa, we'd welcome them and they can be posted to our Facebook live site. The question is that came in and it's simple and profound. I think it's from a student who says I have a traumatic brain injury and that shouldn't limit me, but I'm worried about transportation and something that's so basic and maybe we don't spend a lot of time thinking about, but is this the kind of question you run into a lot in, what can you tell the person who's posed this question to us? How do we think about, is that within your domain? Just thinking about the basic parts of life and getting around Oliver. Yeah, so there are, I've taught about this because I've noticed the amount of students going on scooters all over campus now and how they're using that to get from one classroom to another quickly. For the student, there is a loop service that students can use to go from classroom to classroom. So I would encourage the student to reach out and I'm really sorry to hear about their injury and I hope they get well soon. Yeah, Lisa, is that something that these kind of questions that, you know, very, very basic but essential to accessing all the university has to offer? Well, I mean, that's our job. I know Steve Sutton is talking about every door being the right door. This is the challenge at Berkeley is that you might have a question that seems very simple but you have no idea who to ask. And so we do get a lot of those questions because it's our job to just make this place smaller and to triage and help someone contact the right person. That's often the challenge at Berkeley. We actually have the resource. It's knowing how to access it. And so absolutely that's our job. That's all of our jobs to try to make this place just feel a little more manageable. I have to say as someone who had an ACL tear as a freshman and walked around this campus with prejudice for eight weeks before realizing that that loop service existed at that time it would have been really nice to have known that I could have asked the question. So I feel very, I feel a lot of sympathy about just the difficulty of getting around and students need to know that we're here for them, right? We're here for that to help just make things a little simpler. Yeah. And I would just follow up. I would suggest that the student also lets their instructors know that they're commuting from across campus and that it's a challenge so the instructor can help with class material and just to make life things a bit easier for the student. Yeah. Good point. You know, Lisa, an inherent part of all that you and Oliver talking about is just this orientation to student needs. And let's focus down a little bit. How does the campus see graduate students? Because obviously they play many different roles. Talk to me. Talk to us a little bit about how they're seeing within the context of the institution and its academic mission. The way I've been talking about it is that we can't be a top research university without really robust graduate programs. And so I would like to say that the graduate students have a full program upon which both the undergraduate education enterprise and the faculty research enterprise sit. For undergraduates, they make this place smaller. They help students understand forced material. Often they're the first line of contact within classes because they're easier to get in touch with sometimes or just feel less intimidating than faculty. And so the quality of undergraduate education here in my experience really is driven by the graduate students, instructors. And then for faculty, graduate students are the folks who ask us those tough questions, who help push our edges in terms of our research protocols in terms of what it is we're looking at. They're the ones that are really trying to push the boundaries of our disciplines. And so they keep us engaged. They keep us excited. In many cases, they do the research in labs. They're the ones that actually are conducting the experiments and keeping things going. And so really both parts of the campus depend on our graduate students. And I like to think about campus as an ecosystem and that includes staff, faculty, students, both undergraduate and graduate. And every piece of that ecosystem has to be healthy in order for us to engage with our public mission and really do the work we need to do at the level that we want to do it. Really interesting. So that vision of how we see graduate students is what does that imply in terms of things we need to do different or better? I think it's more just making sure that we understand that they're essential to the work that we're doing, right? So we've done a lot of work on this campus. We were actually on the cutting edge of ensuring that graduate students had to have pedagogical training before they went into the classroom. We were one of the first schools to do that. I think we do really good work in that area. We're now moving into the area that Oliver mentioned of universal design. So training students to design their courses so that they're accessible without having to go through an accommodation process. I think making sure that we advise faculty and make sure faculty are transparent about what mentorship should look like, what expectations should be, what graduate students should be able to expect of their faculty members so there's no miscommunication. It's such a critical relationship that they have with their advisors. And so I think it's just making sure that everyone kind of knows what to expect, that they know where resources are and that they're able to do what they want to do and know that they're an important value part of our community. Just had a really interesting question that's come in from a member of our faculty for both of you. And the question is, is the university looking at a more equitable way of providing feedback on learning rather than an archaic and biased method of grading? Oliver, let me start with you and Lisa, I'll come to you with the same question. So the answer is yes, so the short. So right now, so one of the things that we've, that there's been lots of discussion about grading, especially because we had, we implemented a pass no pass grading scheme at the beginning of the pandemic for the first semester. And that caused a tremendous amount of discussion as much discussion actually as going remote because faculty then started to question what are students learning in my class? What really is the, what does a passing grade in a class mean? And then people also started to realize that, well, many of our students who come here, especially the first year, they're coming from very different backgrounds. Some students come in with 30 units of AP credit, others come in with none. And so you have students taking Chem 1A who've already taken AP Chem. And so it's almost like they're taking the class again, but they're great for the classes based, they're great for the class for the students who haven't taken AP, are dependent on indirectly on the students who've already taken AP Chemistry. And so it's, and it's in an equitable system. So there's a discussion right now in the Senate about looking at our grading for the first year to make it more equitable for our students. So they can get a good start and not feel that like the first mid doing poorly in the first midterm in your first semester at Berkeley is basically the end of your GPA at Berkeley. And similarly, we're also, one of the things that we're also being very deliberate about is what does this mean for transfer students and transfer students with their first semester of experience at Berkeley. So trying to implement the same changes for transfer students for their first semester. Now, I don't have the authority to do this. That's the purview of the Senate, but the Senate is looking at this right now. And the Committee of the Undergraduate Council view this as being their most important work this year. They're really an amazing group of very dedicated faculty and students. And I'm very hopeful we will come out of this with a change. And then that will lead to the change that the person is talking about. The other piece that we can do is to the other campus initiative that we're promoting is the Discovery Initiative, which is to give every student an experiential learning or an immersive learning experience and build that into our curriculum, build that into part of being a Berkeley student. And when you do that, you can create a discovery experience on a curve. And that will change how we view grading and how we view mastery and how we view a successful undergraduate education. So, we've been grading using the same system for over a hundred years. It's gonna take time to change it. But I really do think that there's momentum to change now that wasn't there before. And I'm really happy to see that. Lisa, what is the grading issue look like from your perch? So I also co-chair with Sunny Lee, the Chancellor's Advisory Committee on Student Mental Health and what has become very clear out of that committee is that the academic environment, the competitive nature, right? This idea that only 10% of the student can get A's and that by definition in a class, then you are in competition with one another. You don't wanna study with someone because they might do better than you. I'm like, it creates all of these pernicious outcomes and outcomes that really hurt student wellbeing. And as a parent of someone who was, when he was applying for college, Berkeley's reputation, even compared to UCLA is cutthroat, right? This idea that we're competitive, that it's sink or swim. And so I think that whole culture actually really hurts our students. And so if you're grading on a curve, what you're really doing is saying that our job is not assessment, but rather gatekeeping. And if what we really wanna do as an institution of higher education is ensure that students master the subject matter, it shouldn't, like in my classes, what I do is I let students, if they want, they can rewrite their papers, right? If they get it on the third try, they got it, right? Isn't the point that they got it, not necessarily when or how or that in that one week where they might have had a bipolar roommate that lost it or the other things that happen in life that tests one shot, high risk assessments are not good pedagogy. And so I think that's the conversation that's been happening on campus that it's much better to have much more regular assessments that are really developmental and that are about subject mastery rather than necessarily where do you sit in a hierarchy relative to your other classmates? And so these are the kinds of conversations, as Oliver said, that I think really got much more traction during COVID and during the pandemic that I hope can come to a place where what it's really about is that students' intellectual development relative to the subject matter you're trying to teach. It's not whether or not there are 0.5 percentage points below the line for a B plus. I wanna step back to sort of really big, a big overarching issue. I think both of you saw a message put out beginning of the semester by the executive dean of L&S, Jenna Johnson Hanks. And it was really about what she perceives to be sort of almost an existential threat to the very notion of higher education. She quoted a survey that found 42% of Americans think that colleges and universities, quote, have a negative effect on the way things are going in this country today. And she posed this question in her message and I continue to think about it and I wanna ask both of you what we think and which is who are we and what do we stand for? How is our role evolving? So just to step all the way back, at least I wanna start with you about what do you see in terms of the role, the status of higher education about how we're operating now compared to how we operated in the past and maybe how we should be operating in the future? Talk about this in sort of that highest level. Well, I wouldn't claim to have all the answers. It's a big question. I fundamentally think higher education is about helping people achieve their dreams. And I just looked to my own experience. My parents arrived in this country in 1961 with two suitcases of used clothing expecting their return to Cuba was imminent. I ended up graduating from one of the best institutions in the world. I have a PhD. None of that would have been possible without Berkeley. I had no idea what I was doing when I got to this campus and I'm very grateful to having had that experience, that opportunity to develop and to imagine myself in this place. And that's what we do for our students. And so I think we have to remember that the negative framing of higher education is part of a systematic funded effort that has been ongoing for decades. This didn't just happen. You've had report after report after report criticizing what college is, what the value proposition is, how much people make when they get out, all these things. And we haven't had the other side really systematically talking about what value we are producing, what opportunities we are giving and why it is. I was a comparative literature in Latin American studies undergraduate double major. Talk about irrational impractical degrees that have been tremendously helpful to me. And I've been hardened by all of the news recently that the number of humanities degrees is actually going up. And so perhaps there's a movement away from this idea that it's all about just how much money you make coming out. It's really about helping people kind of move into adulthood. It's really about helping people explore new things and reach their full potential and helping them really figure out who they want to be and how they want to be in the world. And I think we have to be much better about articulating that, about it's not what your starting salary is.  But also to feel good about the work that you're doing every day and to feel like you have reached your full potential as a human being. And so I do think the world of work has changed. I think as, again, as a parent, I have a senior right now, I think the application process is vicious and inhumane for college seniors. The stress around it is a little crazy. So I think we need to figure out how to change that whole process. But I think in the end, the work that we're doing to help young adults reach the next level and launch themselves into their adult lives, I think is critically important and something that we should be proud of doing every day. Thank you. That's a beautiful answer. And Oliver, you need to follow that one up. Your own perspectives about that big picture of higher education. So big picture. I came to the United States from Ireland to do graduate studies because this was the place to go to graduate school. Like graduate schools in the United States were regarded as the best in the world. And you could just see the transformation. The engine of mobility, the big public universities have in this country is extraordinary. But I think part of the 42% needs to be framed in terms of public support for universities. So if we just, if we look at what happened after 2008 with the financial crisis, the state support for public universities across the country just dropped off a cliff. And the way to compensate for that was for students to take out more loans. And so part of the backlash we're seeing is that education has become more expensive, especially public education in part because state support has dwindled for it. And so it's an unfortunate consequence of our political system that declining, giving less funding for public education is viewed somehow as a political win when it's absolutely not the right thing. And I think what we're seeing right now in our democracy is part of that because the things that you learn in university, critical thinking, communication skills, learning how to do research, and basically learning how to be a lifelong learner, those things would be very helpful to us as a society right now. If more people thought about the news they read, the things they heard, and that if they could look at public universities as being a source for the public good, a source for the social transformation that it is. I mean, I run into students all the time who, you know, former students from Berkeley. And I love hearing their stories. I love hearing where they started from and where they ended up. And it's just so inspiring. So I wish for all of the 42% if they could just hear some of the stories of the transformations that happen on our campus, but also on every public university in the country. And I think that would be a huge, you know, I think that would be a game changer. And we also need to get the word out that we need more federal support for public education. You know, the Pell Grant used to cover when it first came out in 1974, covered 80% of your tuition at a public university. Now it doesn't. It's basically $6,000 maximum, which does not cover, it does not sufficiently cover the cost of education. So doubling the Pell would be cost the United States $30 billion a year. And just think about how much good that would do. So I can't think of a better way to end what's been a really wide-ranging and fascinating conversation with the two answers you both gave, which were inspirational and sobering somehow at the very same time. So Lisa and Oliver, thanks so much for your time. And for the thoughtfulness and your dedication to the university's mission. It was great to have you here today. Thank you so much, Dan. Thank you, Dan. It's a pleasure. And thanks everybody for joining us. We look forward to seeing you for the next campus conversation, which if I'm not mistaken, will be our traditional semester wrap up with none other than Chancellor Carol Christ. Enjoy the rest of your day. And thanks again for joining us.


The only easy day was yesterday.  Stop trying to hide from the pain. Heads up, eyes open. Welcome to The Only Easy Day Was Yesterday, the official Navy SEAL podcast. Whether you've dreamed about becoming a Navy SEAL as a kid, or just found out that being a SWIC is something you'd like to learn more about, you probably have a lot of questions. I'm Daniel Fletcher, and today I'm speaking with three experts on the SEAL and SWIC recruiting process. They're personal experiences from an active duty SEAL and a SWIC operator whose names have been changed for security. So from the top here, let's just have you guys introduce yourself. We'll start with you, and then go across, and you guys can just give us a brief summary of what you guys do here. Okay, awesome. My name is Sean. I'm United States Navy SEAL. I'm here at the SEAL SWIC scout team with these other two gentlemen beside me. And just basically part of our job is to do outreach and reach out to the youth, high school kids or college kids to give them ideas of what it takes to be a Navy SEAL or a SWIC. My name is Chief Brian Murray. I coordinate the outreach efforts, plan the trips, help put the budgets together, and act as kind of a liaison between the operators and the recruiting districts. Hi, my name is Frank. I'm a SWIC operator, special warfare combatant craft crewman. I've been doing that for about 10 years, and my role here at the SEAL SWIC scout team is essentially the same as Sean's. We go out, we talk to high schools and colleges, narrow down to athletes and try to give a real-world perspective on what it takes to be a SEAL or a SWIC. Nice. Well, thank you guys for taking the time to talk with us again. Let's go through this process from the beginning, from your perspective, kind of first steps for somebody that might be interested in a career in naval special warfare.  Okay, so for anybody that's interested in this program, the first step that they need to take is to go down to their local recruiting station. What's going to take place at that meeting first is they're going to get mentally, morally, and physically qualified. What that means is they're going to take an ASVAB test or a practice ASVAB test to make sure that they meet the minimum requirements academically. They're also going to screen them, check and see if they've ever been in any kind of trouble. If so, what waivers are available for them. And then they'll also set up a physical at MEPS to make sure that they don't have any physical problem surgeries, things that they need waivers for. So once they get pre-qualified, we'll schedule a MEPS day. The MEPS will bring them in, check their heart, check their vision, their hearing. Once we determine that they are qualified for this program, they'll start working out with local Navy recruiting district scouts similar to what these guys do, but a little different. They're just responsible for the local area, guys and girls, and they'll take them out. They'll do physical screening tests, different things on a local level, and get them ready for the process until they are selected. Maybe we can go a little bit deeper into that from your perspective. These are any Navy recruiting centers, or is it a specific Navy SEAL or special operations kind of tracked that these people have to go take? Well, first they're going to need to go visit a traditional Navy recruiting station. The reason that is is because to join the Navy as a special warfare operator, you first have to join the Navy. So you have to get qualified to do those things. Now, they can go get pre-qualified without joining the Navy and still go work out with the special warfare operator, scouts. They're there to get them physically ready, but they can't actually take the step of joining until they've visited a real recruiting station. And those typically, if you go on to Navy.com or our website SEALSWIC.com, they'll have links to those recruiting stations and they'll be able to find, put in their zip code and figure out whatever's closest. Okay. Can you tell us a little bit about the ASVAP test for people that might not be familiar with it? Okay. So the ASVAP test, it's an aptitude test that's broken down. I believe it's eight different categories. It'll be everything from mathematics, arithmetic reasoning, spelling, word comprehension, mechanics. There's a couple that I'm leaving out, but you probably get the gist of what it is. So we'll test them in several different categories. Each job field will require a score made up of a couple of those categories, maybe two to four, depending on which job it is. And they'll take those scores to make sure that they're eligible for these programs. Do people have a chance to retest or is this something that's kind of like a once and done thing? That's a good question. You can take the ASVAP from the first time you take it. If you don't do as well as you want, you can take it again 30 days later. If you still don't get the best score that you want, you can do it 30 days after that. But after that third test, you have to wait six months until you take another ASVAP. So the best advice I can give is to go online. There's a lot of practice ASVAP tests. So to do those online as much as you can before you take the actual test. And what is MAPS? Military Entrance Processing Station. That's where they go in to take their physical. So that's their entry into the Navy, basically. Okay. So after the regular Navy recruiting process, how does the process differ for Naval Special Warfare? So the process is only different as then they get additional training. Instead of just going to learn to be a sailor and about their specific job, they actually have physical requirements that they have to maintain throughout the process. So what they'll do with these scouts is typically couple times a week, two to three, it just depends on the scout schedule. They'll take them through and work them out. We actually just visited the recruiting district in Denver and Sean actually helped monitor the physical screening test. So they'll do that a couple times a week whereas somebody that joins in a traditional job rating, they would not have to do that. Okay. So physical requirements, athletic requirements, we'll say are kind of the main difference at that stage. Correct. And then the steps follow that. If you can maybe just walk us through the next steps through, I guess you could call it the selection process or if there's another term for that. So it is. They call it a draft. It's similar to, I guess, you could maybe compare it to a sports draft. They will perform the PST as many times as they can and get their scores as elevated as possible. Once they get done to the point to where they're competitive nationwide, they'll be put into the draft system. Naval Special Warfare will pick as many candidates as they need or they feel that they want to take on each month and they'll select from that group of individuals. So other than the PST scores, what are the people looking for in the draft? Maybe are they looking at metrics of the person's physical stature or is it a collection of things? Could you maybe tell us a little bit about that? It is. It's a big collection of things and it can be complex at times. First, they're going to look at their ASVAB score, their PST scores. They're going to take a kind of a psychological test. It's called the C-Sort. For those of you that don't know what C-Sort stands for, it's computerized special operations resiliency test. So this is something that's done on a computer, I'm guessing. It is done on the computer in a recruiting station and you will have a proctor that won't be in while you're taking the test, but they have to administer the test. They will print out your score and that will be sent in with your application package. How long does that take normally, would you guess? Are you referring to the draft in general? The test? It depends on the person. If the person is really spending a lot of time trying to answer the questions perfectly, it could take them a couple hours. Oh wow, okay. In reality, there is no perfect answer, so you should just take the test, answer whatever your first instinct is for the answer and it typically would take an hour to an hour and 15 minutes. I see, so they're looking to select people that will make it through the training process and become an active operator. The C-Sort is almost a predictor. I got you. Mentally for who could make it. Obviously physically, I mean there's a lot of variables that could happen while they're in training, but this isn't a definite answer. This is just something that they use to gauge. So let's say if somebody gets a low C-Sort score, they're going to have to have elevated physical standard scores. If they do really well on the C-Sort, meaning mentally they're prepared as much as this test says they need to be, then maybe their physical scores can be a little lower. But they'll use a combination of those. Is there anything that you would recommend in regards to this kind of psychological kind of evaluation or the ASVAP test kind of approaching this process, like kind of off-the-cuff advice you give to somebody, like just things that you've heard, that you've seen people do wrong or right or kind of dressed a success kind of behavior? So assuming that somebody's listening, maybe their freshman year, 13, 14-year-old and trying to figure out how to navigate this to their senior year, the best advice I could give is to take the classes that are going to keep them at an academic standard they need to be. If they have the opportunity to take accelerated math and science classes, they should definitely do that. Those things are going to be on the ASVAP. The psychological test, there's really no preparation that's by design. That's something that we want to know without any preparation at what kind of answers they're going to come up with. But the ASVAP test really just goes back to school. Instead of taking a semester where you take some random elective classes that you don't need, you really need to focus in on taking math and science classes. And physically, those are things that they need to get on our website, sealswik.com, and we have workouts, and they need to start doing those really from their freshman year onto their senior year. I mean, it's never too late, but it's never too early to start either. I think that's some really good advice. Well, next, I'd like to open up and talk to you guys about your kind of specific experience going through this recruitment process from the SWIC and SEAL perspective. So, Frank, can you just talk to us a little bit about your journey through the recruit to being an operator? If you could maybe just walk us through your journey. Sure. Yeah, so I would dare to say that things have changed a bit since my go-around. It's been nearly 10 years. But for the most part, I think that there's so much more information out there nowadays, and it makes, I don't want to say things easier, but it's just so much more accessible. So here's a, for instance, when I came in, most of the process that Chief Murray was talking about was mostly the same as far as the physical screening test. You had to take that in order to be applicable for any of these programs. And so for those who may not know the physical screening test is comprised of five different evolutions. And the first one is a 500-yard swim, side stroke and or breast stroke. Then you have maximum push-ups in two minutes, maximum sit-ups in two minutes, maximum pull-ups in two minutes, and a mile-and-a-half run. And so the side stroke was something that was extremely foreign to me when I went to go take on this challenge. I had never done it. I'd swam in high school at my senior year. I was on the swim team, but all I did was the 50-free, which was essentially where they put slow people. Is it something that you pursued because you wanted a career in the Navy or specifically special warfare? No, actually, I was sent to military school in my senior year of high school. So they made you swim?  It was mandatory. We didn't have a football team. And the two sports that I, the interesting the most were wrestling and swimming. Unfortunately, these two things were both in the same season. I ended up doing both of them, but I was exhausted all the time. But it did make me a lot stronger and more resilient. And I think that that did add to my preparation for the training, no doubt. But by the time I actually got to the point where I knew that that was what I was going to do, I still had no clue what the side stroke was. And when I went to approach it to learn how to do this, all I found was on navy.com was a two-page hand-drawn diagram of a person doing the side stroke. And that's how I learned how to do the side stroke. So nowadays, you go onto our website, for instance, you can find videos, or just going onto YouTube, you can find it. There's people who train in so many more locations.  And so it's really easy to find that type of stuff to help better prepare. And just like Chief Murray said, talking about just the workouts alone we have on our website, not to mention any other training programs that are out there. So that being said, when I came through there was a lot less information, but it was something that I really knew I wanted to do, starting about midway through my senior year. And I just made the leap, went through the recruiter's office. And I had heard a lot of stories, I think that a lot of people can sympathize with this. If you have listeners that are already in the navy or people are thinking about it, they've maybe heard these stories before, where you hear these horror stories of dealing with military recruiters, right? So that was my thought going in, that I'm going to go in. They're going to hassle me. They're going to try to sell me on something. And I didn't experience any of that. I went in and I was confident about what I wanted to do. And I think they sensed that. They think they knew that I was a man on a mission. And so they just pretty much like, okay. And they made things happen the best they could. Once I went in, first I went to all the different recruiting offices with Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, just to kind of narrow down my decision. I always tell people when we go to our presentations, that's exactly what I did. So I suggest that's what you do, that way you're making the most informed decision. And then I decided finally on the SWIC pipeline. Let me just interject real quick. For people that don't know SWIC versus CO, to my knowledge, that's a relatively new kind of distinction. Can you describe a little bit or explain for the layman what a SWIC is? Sure. Yeah, absolutely. So SWIC stands for Special Warfare, Combat and Craft Crewman. Military Loves acronym. So it's a lot easier to say it that way, right? So SWIC, our job is the Maritime Mobility Asset for Naval Special Warfare. And what that really means is we drive the fast boats for Naval Special Warfare. So we have a range of missions. Primarily what we're most known for is insert extract of SEALs or other soft forces, whether that's at a beach landing site or visit board search and seizure. So like a pirated vessel. But we also have direct action missions, intelligence surveillance reconnaissance. There's all different types of things that we provide. Another thing we're famous for is our ability to launch our boats out of the back of airplanes and jump in with them so that we have kind of like a quick assault, quick reaction type element. So that's SWIC in a nutshell. So where through the process did you realize, hey, this is for me? That was just kind of doing my research. From the beginning I knew that I was going to do special operations. It was just my mentality on things is that I wanted to join the military. And once I really discovered that I wanted to join the military I knew I had to do something that was just so much more of a challenge. I needed to do it to be the best. And I wanted to have the most effect on the war on terror. So I was like special operations where I want to be. So I went on to talk to the recruiter, the Army recruiter is about Army SF and Rangers. And I talked to the Marines about recon. I talked to the Navy about SEALs. I actually never heard of SWIC until I talked to the recruiters. So at what point did the training kind of diverge into boat specific for you in the SWIC track? Okay, yeah. So everybody regardless of special operations or not goes to Navy boot camp. So I went to Navy boot camp and then that's in Great Lakes, Illinois. And then after that I went to Coronado out here in Coronado. Back then they didn't have the prep course, which they have now. And it's about a week course in Great Lakes before you come out here. And that's for SEAL and SWIC candidates. So even more tools now. Exactly. Yeah, it's really an added benefit that they have. And I wish that they had had it when I went through, but I was still successful. So at Bud's somewhere you start learning about boats or is it after? It's a completely separate pipeline. Okay. So the way it works is nowadays after prep you would come out here and then the Bud's and the SWIC students would go through orientation together. And then after that they split up into first phase and the SWIC pipeline. And then after three weeks of orientation you start the actual training. And so then the basic crewman training is the selection portion. So much like first phase for the SEAL pipeline, it's all about making sure, throwing it down, whittling it down to the people that are right for the job. It's not so much about getting rid of people, it's just capturing the people that you want. And then the best way I always say it is for an instructor, they're looking for the person that they would either want to work with or they would want to replace them. So and that's the way that it's looked at. And so anyways that's the selection portion of it. Basic crewman training. And then you go to crewman qualification training and that's where you really start to learn about your job. Where you know you're learning about the boats, the weapons, the comms, the skill sets, the operating procedures, all that stuff so that when you actually get to your boat team that you are an asset to your team. Training doesn't stop when you graduate from training at the center. That's only where it begins.  Wow, okay. I think that's something a lot of people don't realize. It's something that's daunting to a lot of people when they look ahead of that because they look at the either graduating buds or BCT or just the whole pipeline as the end of things. Like they've arrived when they graduate. And then the problem with that mindset is that when you graduate now you're going to a team where everybody's made this accomplishment so you really haven't accomplished anything. The bar's just been set at a little bit higher but you're still starting from the ground floor once you get there. And I guess if you could give us an example, a real-world example of maybe as much as you can tell us about an active operation, kind of paint a picture of what you do on the boat and maybe what one of your operations would look like from your perspective. So special operations, standard rule is you're always going to be working at night. You're going to be working when your enemy's not. So typically we're not waking up super early in the morning. More than likely we're getting ready throughout the day to operate out throughout the night. And so the main thing is preparation. We always want to be as prepared as possible. We want to stack everything in our favor. So making sure every little minutia of the mission and our gear and our boats and everything is prepared to the best way possible so that we've gone over everything and that if Murphy does visit the mission then we are at least as prepared as we possibly can be and we can adapt and overcome in that scenario. The missions can range from going under way and doing a recce on a target, which is reconnaissance or inserting a seal platoon over the beach in more of a stealthy manner where it could be extracting them in a hot environment, which a hot environment being if they're taking on fire then we have the ability to go in and pull them out. Well, I think that paints a really good picture for a lot of people that don't know the difference between seal, SWIC, TRAC, or that there's even a difference or paints a more accurate picture for people that there's even an option in naval special warfare other than just becoming a seal. Sean, from your perspective as a seal, is there anything that you noticed different from your experience going through the recruitment process as you're listening to Frank talk about his journey coming in a SWIC operator? Oh, yeah, I can. I didn't know anything much about being a Navy Seal at the time. Me growing up, I grew up with my grandmother in D.C., Washington, D.C. on the East Coast, and she was the one who pushed me into the military. I had no desire to join, didn't care, never been in the ocean, never swam anywhere. That was my whole thing. I just went through a regular recruiting situation as going to a recruiting station like Brian talked about and they kind of talked me into some things of what I can do and some more physical things. I came in with a SAR Swimmer contract as a rescue swimmer. So I was already in the military doing something totally different and then the seals came kind of, I just kind of fell into the situation where I was working with the seals. And that's when I realized, you know what, this is something I want to do. This is it for me. So I went through that whole growing pain of growing up to be a man and something that I really wanted to do. So I went on deployment once and I came back, put in a package for her to go to Buzz and be a Navy Seal. And I went into the program. My class for me was about 300 strong, almost, pretty close. You mean the graduating class or just starting out? Starting out, starting out. It's about 300 strong in my class and I see what I want and this is what I'm going to do. I'm about to go after this. And I went to the program. We got into the ocean and started throwing two of my ocean swims against something that I was never familiar with growing up from where I've come from. And it was just, it was hard. It was really hard for me. I barely passed almost every physical test. Now, I was always a physical guy though. So I could, I can gut through it. But two my ocean swims, never even thought something about that. Four mile time runs, four in the morning. Wasn't an end to that neither.  That was something totally different from me also. So I had a lot of growing pains in that situation. Yeah, I think you bring up a good point. I think a lot of people might be averse to thinking that this is something they could even do. Or let's say someone's got a colored past.  And it's like, well, there's no way I could do that. You know, I think that your life experience says otherwise. And I think that's something a lot of people should think about if they might have, you know, gotten a little trouble in their lives or heck, I've never even been to the ocean. That's not going to stop you from doing this. No. I think that's important for people to realize. No, not at all. Physically, I was always a strong guy. You know, I played sports in high school. I was a football star. I ran track. So I did those things. But again, that was all on the ground. And that was more of a sprinting type thing for me. But everything I did would be coming to Navy SEAL. Joining the military was totally opposite for me and was never a thought. So now you're right. People just don't understand that they can be more than whatever situation they've grown up in. You don't have to live that lifestyle or believe that that's your going to be your life. If you really want something, you can just do it. You just got to focus on it. What do you say to those people that might think that, like, you know, maybe I could do this, but, you know, I can't do that? I would say inspiration is what it is. Inspiration is what's going to take you to get through anything that's going to have challenges to it. For me, I would say to anyone like that, you know, find out what the inspiration could be. It's all in your mind. And if you can control your thoughts and control your mind, you can tell your body to do whatever. But you just need to find what the inspiration is for you. And then you just focus on that. And then it'll help you get through any challenge that you ever face. That's what I believe. So for any kid, just find the inspiration that you have in your life growing up. And if you feel like you don't have one, there is one out there. You just got to find it.  And you just follow them. You know, did I ever thought for an instant that I was going to be that guy? Not one time. But because of my drive and my inspiration, I decided I was going to be the guy who's going to grind hard and I was going to make this no matter what. Nobody was going to get in my way and didn't matter the instructor, didn't matter the other kids in the class. I wanted this and I was going to grind hard and I was going to crush this whole program. And I had to study a little harder than most because in high school I didn't do what I needed to do to prepare myself mentally, to comprehend diet physics and all these different things that I never even thought about. All the math that we talked about for ASVAP, I kind of just blew that stuff off in high school. So when I got to this portion of training, I had to really study a little more than everyone else. So I was up late nights, long, long tiring. But it helped me. I graduated, I passed those tests, those written academic tests, and I passed the physical test and I was a leader and I wanted everybody to follow me, follow behind me at the time. And that's what puts me right here right now. And I enjoy giving back to these kids and when we're done talking to these kids, they always come up and talk to us about certain things that they took out of our presentation that they can relate to, that they want to use and probably show me something. And I'm happy to be an inspiration to some of them kids at the same time. Sean, so if you could a minute tell us a little bit about what seal life is like from a professional standpoint. Okay, no problem. So we're going to go right into right when you graduate a seal qualification training, right? That's when you get your pin. And from there, you get assigned to your seal team, whether East Coast, West Coast, or the one out in Hawaii, STV team. For me, I got orders out to seal team one out in San Diego. So what happens is each seal team is on a rotation. You normally deploy every two years, but depending on when you arrive at that seal team, you may be just getting in before they deploy while they're on deployment or a few months prior to deployment where they're getting ready to start working up. So we'll break it down into you're getting to your seal team right when you're getting ready to start working up to prepare for deployment. So they call it a six month time period of work. We call it work up where you start to train again, back into it, your training nonstop. You're flying here, flying there, staying in hotels. You're out in the desert, California desert, and you're doing so many variations of training to kind of put you in a position to understand your job. For me, I was a breacher and some of us also get school. So I was, when I first joined my first seal team, they sent me to Virginia where I had to go to a breacher school. Breachers are, what most people understand is, the people that plant C4 on doors to get us in, you've seen the movies or another variation things. So I had to learn about demolition, C4, how to calculate demo charges. So I went out to that school that was primarily my main job as I was the lead breacher for my team. So whenever we came to an obstacle, I was the guy who figured out a way to get in and planted a charge and we blow it and we get in. So that school was about two months. It was amazing. I enjoyed it. Very difficult. While I went there, other guys go to sniper schools. Some go to comm school. It just depends on whatever school or whatever specific job you really want to be in. Is that kind of dependent on what the team needs at the time or is that dependent more on your ability, skills, your size, anything like that? Kind of all of that in the mix. What the team needs, each platoon and a seal team, there's about nine platoons. Each nine platoon has about 16 to 20 seals in each one. And depending on which platoon, you may need so many snipers, so many breachers, so many comms guys. And they'll send a certain amount of numbers out to these schools to get these qualifications. So when we deploy, we're set. Because you'll never deploy, an entire seal team never deploys together. Each platoon will go somewhere else. I've always been to Iraq when some platoons in Guam, some platoons in Africa, all over the world, you know, so. And so you need to be self-sufficient because you have what you have and that's it. And you don't have a short amount of men. So, yeah, with that. So I got a breacher. It was great. Then you come back together. Everybody come back together. And we started doing our work up. So now we're in California desert for a few months and we're working on our tactics, you know, calls. Everybody's getting the training from our lieutenants to our senior enlisted advisor guys. We're all getting training. We're all just learning what it's like. So that is like rigorous training for six months hard, nonstop. If you're married, kids, it's hard on them. Because you're in, you may come back home to Reorg and you're here for like a week, a week and a half and then you're gone again.  And so it just constantly goes on for about six, seven months. After that, you have about a month and a half, two months before of just sitting around, just kind of like getting used to your family, seeing your family, spending time with them. Deployments last about seven to nine months on average, depending on what's going on, depending on the area of the country you're going to. So you're gone again. And again, you may not have much abilities to reach out and talk to your families through email, phone, services and all that stuff because we really operate isolated from a lot of different things. When you come back from a deployment, NSW, Nikola Special Warfare, I want to say they're really good. We'll give you a time that relaxed with your family when you come back from deployment. Just go home, spend time with your family, your kids, get back to them. And even while you're gone, they have a lot of, we call them ombudsman, they have a lot of things. They try to like include your wives, kids, family members, girlfriends or whatever into what's going on, possibly overseas while you're gone. So they try to bring them in to kind of make them feel at ease at the same time.  When it's time to work, we work in this nonstop.  We train harder than our deployments are meant to be because they want to put us in a position where if you face any kind of hardship or crazy, you know, chaotic situation on deployment, you've already seen it during training. So you already know you can defeat it. So we train harder than we deploy. And that's the main gist of it. We train to fail because you know if you've ever seen anything crazy as this, then you know you can overcome it. That's why our training is meant to beat you down.  And that's what you want to be if you want to be a Navy sailor. You want to be a part of the Naval Special Warfare period. That's what you have to have if you want to be successful at it. That's why we really get at what we do. That's why the President calls us up when he needs a real mission to go down. Well, real quick before we finish, I'd like to touch back with you guys real quick after hearing everyone talk. If you guys could give us each a nugget of information to potential recruit a piece of advice or maybe something that you did wrong that you would say don't do this, we'll go ahead and start with you, Frank. My main piece of advice is just to have a willingness to struggle and suffer. It might not be as eloquent as some people would like, but that's really what it boils down to is you're in this line of work or you're trying to get in this line of work for a purpose and it takes a lot to get to that. So just be willing to put up with all of the struggle and the hardship that it takes in order to get on the other side and it'll all be worth it. Yeah, I know that it's coming down the pipe for you. Yeah, I got you. Chief Murray. The best advice I can give is to use our website. We have workouts. We have links to everything you need and we can offer a lot of information whether it be on the phone or in person, but that website is there and we have people that are standing by ready to help and we can't answer questions that we're not asked and all you have to do is log on that website, get interactive with the moderators that are on there and we'll get whatever information that you need to you. And if you want to plug that website real quick, go ahead. Okay, it's sealswik.com. Can you spell that out for us? S-E-A-L-S-W-C-C dot com. Nice. Sean, any last bits of advice you could give for us? I will say just get comfortable being uncomfortable. This job is, it comes with a huge, you know, you get a lot of significance from it. You know, a lot of you enjoy it, but you're going to do a lot of stuff that you're not comfortable with and you got to get used to being comfortable with that, doing stuff like that. And just do it. You know, don't overthink it. If you want to be a seal, if you want to be a swick, don't try to, you know, try to think you need to understand every single thing about what it needs, what it takes to be us, to be in our shoes to do the job. I don't think you need to be the most tip-top, shape guy in the world. Let it come to you. When you sign up for the program, just go into it. It's all about your mind. All about your mind. So if you want it bad enough, you'll finish it. Definitely be in shape, some kind of shape, but don't think you need to be, you know, the baddest person in the world. Just do it. Find out more at sealswik.com and join us again for the next NSW podcast.


When we refer to higher dimension, what exactly it is? From evolutionary point of view, human beings are the most sophisticated species. What is it exactly after that? On this planet, don't think you are the most sophisticated being on this planet. So what exactly it means from this reference point of view as a human being, higher dimension after this, is it something in some other planet or is it some energy form? What exactly is it and are there any levels of higher dimension? Because the evolution is progressing, so if we say higher dimension, are there more levels to it? In your experience of life, do you find all human beings at the same level of evolution? I'm asking you, without prejudice, with all due respect to every human being, do you find every human being at the same level of evolution? Nobody has a tail though, that they've passed. But there are many who look more complete with a tail or horns. A whole lot of them would look more complete with the horn growing out of their head because they're always… yes or no. You drive on the street and see, in this country it's better though the traffic is such a mess, though driving in India is probably the most challenging thing. But I see in other countries, the drivers driving their dream cars are on the edge. Smallest thing, they're in a rage. Actually that is not so much here at least in South India, in North India we know road rages. In South it's not like that, we crash into each other, we sit down and discuss and maybe we'll settle our son's wedding or daughter's wedding right there. We believe this is our fate, we crash together. We met with a bang. You don't see much rage on Southern Indian roads but North India it happens. But in other countries I see the rage is so much, though traffic is far more discipline, very rarely anybody gets into your way. Here every moment somebody is getting in your way. Everybody is you know trying to earn that seven years imprisonment by attempting… they're all testing their horoscope. Their astrologer has told them you will live to eighty years. So they're testing it today whether it's true or not. It's a whole lot of things happening. So in spite of all this horoscope testing, you don't find much rage. So people who are in such a state of rage, if you gave them claws and horns, it would be more suitable, isn't it? For their state of mind and emotion, they actually want to claw somebody but they don't have the claws. The evolutionary process should be one day they'll get the claws. So you don't find all of them the same level of evolution because it's a threshold that we have crossed. That doesn't mean that's the end of it. Because the significance of being human is just this, we are not doing anything very different from what the other creatures are doing, same damn things. We are born, they are born just like that. Their mothers delivered them, our mothers delivered us. Their mothers were more efficient with delivery, our mothers struggled. Okay? Yes? Because they delivered in hundreds, our mother to deliver one, she struggled so much. They eat, we eat, they sleep, we sleep. They reproduce, we may reproduce.  The only thing is we can do all this, we can conduct all these very simple aspects consciously. So in a day, from the moment I leave the sleep time for you, that also needs to be considered, but we will leave that. From the moment you come awake till the moment you fall asleep, how many moments and how many actions and how many thoughts and how many emotions or how much percentage of it do you conduct consciously. This will determine the state of your evolution right now. If you conduct it consciously, you will do it in a certain way. If you are going about compulsively, you will look like any other creature. Yes? You will look like just any other creature, not any different. Once you do things compulsively, only when you conduct it consciously, you seem to be on the peak of evolution on this planet, not otherwise. So you can gauge by yourself, I don't want to pass… I don't want to pass a judgment on anybody.  If you are less than one percent, you know there's a lot of work to do. And I would tell you, if I have to speak frankly, more than ninety percent is less than one percent. Less than, well below one percent, more than ninety percent of the people. Those ten percent who do little more than one percent, suddenly they look like such graceful beings. Just from tomorrow morning, you want to do it from tomorrow morning? Or now?  You see, if you conduct this consciously for five minutes, by tomorrow morning people will bow down to you without knowing why they're doing. So that's evolution and it's something you can do. If you just see it's me, not something else, you will evolve because once you become human, you have enough awareness and consciousness to evolve consciously. When you were a monkey, you did not decide I'll become human being. Nature just pushed you on. But now you're conscious enough to decide, I want to evolve from where I am to whatever is possible. Just, just try, just maintain five minutes, manage your life consciously today. You will see tomorrow morning how you will be. You will be shining, believe me.