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By Kathleen Maclay and Kathleen Scalise, Public Affairs
Christine
Ng received Berkeley's top student honor May 9 at Commencement
Convocation when Chancellor Berdahl presented her
with the University
Medal, awarded each year to Berkeley's most outstanding
graduating senior. Ng has a 3.99 grade point average
and a stellar record of student leadership and service.
In the video clips below, she talks about what it took
to become Berkeley's top student and reflects on her
experiences.
Men
everywhere
Most of Ng's immediate classmates are men, typical in
her major of civil and environmental engineering that
at Berkeley is 70 percent male and 30 percent female.
As president of the campus's branch of the Society
of Women Engineers, Ng has tried to inspire young
girls to become civil engineers through visits to local
schools, where she does outreach work to "make
engineering more alive," she says.
In
the video clip below, Ng describes her initial apprehension
about being a woman in engineering, and the relief she
felt on discovering men welcomed her into the field.
University Medalist Christine Ng speaks of working in
a male-dominated field. (requires
Quicktime
4 or higher)
A
different take on diversity
Berkeley,
a place known for its diversity, is many things to many
people. Ng talks about the richness of the Berkeley
experience as based on a "diversity of ideas."
Students "come from all walks of life," she
says, "but they come here to learn. People are
very excited about that and I like the energy that the
campus has."
Ng talks about the vitality of the Berkeley experience.
(Requires
Quicktime
4 or higher)
Childhood
experiences
Ng,
whose father is in banking and whose mother is a paralegal,
came to Berkeley from Ramona Convent Secondary High
School, student population 500, in Southern California.
She had planned to be an architect until a high school
biology teacher nudged her to enter an engineering design
contest, and she found her niche. Here she talks about
her childhood experiences, and time spent in school
activities and daycare.
Ng reflects on her many hours spent in childcare and
after-school activities. (Requires
Quicktime
4 or higher)
What
the future holds
Ng
is off to MIT in the fall for graduate school. She plans
to combine technology with business and public policy,
something she said most engineers are reluctant to do.
"Now
the decisions are pretty much made by the bureaucrats,
who don't understand the engineering," Ng said
of projects to build roads, dams, water systems and
other structures.
With
her strong background in wise use of the environment,
Ng has set herself a worthy goal — but one that
may be even harder to achieve than being the top student
at Berkeley: Convincing industry that what is good for
the environment is also good for business.
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