THE SPACE I DO NOT FILL

WHAT WE LEAVE BEHIND, NOW

Berkeley swallowed me as soon as I arrived. I never doubted my insignificance amongst the waves of students I brushed shoulders with on Sproul. I could travel to apartments at the very ends of the AC Transit bus lines and still find a Berkeley student there. This is the mammoth of college towns, stretching and sprawling to contain the bright minds that migrated to this corner of California. The only memories of past students reside in photo archives and class gifts, collectives that force each student into anonymity.

As I work on my senior thesis, I know it will not reach Berkeley’s prime real estate of glass showcases and photo frames. When the final notes of “Pomp and Circumstance” escape the air above Memorial Stadium, I will carry the work from the past four years home with me in a singular hard drive. Perhaps some Environmental Sciences student (Expected Graduation: 2045) will come across my papers through a broken link on the Rausser College website. But my work will not have any physical presence in Berkeley, ever. Berkeley, constantly displaying students’ artifacts, will never know mine. This is alright — I expect this. 

The mementos that remain were built by students who do more than type. Their hands are magic, pulling something out of nothing as they learn in lecture halls equipped with technology most of us will never recognize. Over four years, they build, then build some more. After a senior capstone course, they end their final year with a product that embodies every mechanical engineering lesson from their time at Berkeley. The only requirements are that the final product must move and sense.

Students Hadar Gamliel, John John Huddleston, and Shaan Jagani jumped to the only obvious solution to this challenge: a robot that can play the ukulele. Self-identifying as “musically challenged,” John John took on the task of building a robot that could play music better than himself. The robot would sense audio input from the soundhole, then adjust its “fingers” to construct a new chord once a strumming pattern was complete. Together, the team spent days in the windowless basement of Hesse Hall to realize this dream. The time and effort led to an emotional attachment between the team and their project, as well as the robot’s only anthropomorphic trait — the name Ukε (pronounced Yookee).

Ukε spent its glory days basking in the praise of the capstone instructor, enjoying its moments of fame under the spotlight at the MechE student symposium. Now, it sits in Hadar’s room, waiting to perform once again. In the upcoming years, it may join the campus’ graveyard of abandoned capstone projects. 

But this is not the team’s first time dealing with deserted objects. In Hesse Hall, a robot that Hadar helped to take its first step is now unused. As he crosses the McLaughlin Hall breezeway, Shaan regularly passes under canoes built for the first concrete canoe competitions in the 1980s. Windmills from a lower-division course are strewn across cabinets in miscellaneous breezeways, while senior-capstone contraptions of years past lie on classroom machinery. Though the students recognize the melancholic nature of these objects’ fate, they see a life for the rejects beyond simply collecting dust. 

Hadar’s first mobile robot was just that — the first robot, the first iteration. Newer robots will perform better than the one Hadar handled. Decades-old concrete canoes are examples, proof that all students are capable of completing complex construction projects from scratch. As for Ukε — the robot will be, per the capstone professor’s promise, a case study for future classes. MechE students who excitedly anticipate the capstone classes will know about the students’ hard work and reference Hadar, John John, and Shaan as a source. These products — while seen as “final” for many seniors — were prototypes. In their end-of-life stages, the objects make progress towards something better down the line. They are still tools, unwasted, to pass down information. 

This legacy is more than what Hadar could have hoped for as she worked on her capstone. “It’s not left behind,” she explains. “These projects are just really big stepping stones.”

I have always known that I stand on the shoulders of giants, but I cannot imagine myself turning into one. With the work I leave behind, now, I would estimate that I am more of a somewhat-sturdy dwarf. Perhaps it is the aesthetics of the clutter at the College of Engineering that convinces me of this. The past is so tangible; I can try on now-patented cat ear headphones in the Citris Tech Museum and play with the suction cups of a two-year-old wall-climbing robot in Hesse Hall. My endeavors do not take up space in quite the same way. 

Within a semester, this issue of Caravan will no longer be in Berkeley’s magazine stands. My byline will rest snugly in these pages, which will (hopefully) be placed neatly on coffee tables and bookshelves. My physical presence in Berkeley will be all but erased — but editors long after me will (hopefully) follow the Caravan style guide and thoughtfully consider their balance of individuality and cohesion. My words and stories will (hopefully) be a tool like those left here, efforts unwasted. 

Words: Anjika Pai

Photos: James Nguyen, Monserrat Arantza Urbina