This 9-month paid post-undergraduate fellowship supports one recent graduate from UC Berkeley in discovering their personal path to peace through immersive service supporting a partnership between Berkeley High School and Berkeley City College to increase college access. The selected fellow will join a group of students from other leading universities across the United States to animate the Shinnyo-en Foundation’s Infinite Paths to Peace Initiative.

Supporters

The Shinnyo College Access Fellowship is generously supported by the Shinnyo-en Foundation.

Important Dates

Fellowship Details

In this fellowship, the Shinnyo Fellow will support college access and awareness. They will work directly with the dual enrollment program at Berkeley City College (BCC) which allows Berkeley High School students to take college courses at BCC for free. Through this program, high school students earn transferrable college while gaining exposure to the culture and expectations of a college experience. The fellow will focus on recruiting and advising would-be first-generation college students.

The Fellow meets regularly with a PSC staff adviser for coaching/advising and with a staff member at Berkeley City College who will supervise their daily work.

They will be expected to maintain a service journal (video, audio, written) and to complete a final project documenting their service journey during the Fellowship. This project may be a video, a paper, or a presentation that shares learnings that could be relevant to others in the peacebuilding movement.

2024-2025 Shinnyo College Access Fellow

Sydney Tran (she/her) recently graduated from UC Berkeley, where she obtained a B.A. in Psychology with minors in Linguistics and Early Development & Learning Science. She grew up in Sacramento and went to Folsom High School, where she developed a love for service and giving back to her community. This work continued into her undergraduate years, where she worked alongside BUILD (Berkeley United in Literacy Development) as a mentor and director. For four years, she provided one-on-one literacy support to elementary school students with the goal of building confidence and a love for reading, as well as training and mentorship for fellow mentors in her role as a director. For the past two summers, she has also been a teaching assistant for Pre-College Academy, which is hosted by UC Berkeley’s Early Academic Outreach Program. In this position, she had the opportunity to support her classroom instructor while providing individual guidance and academic support to high schoolers in her class. These experiences, combined with her involvement with other high school outreach programs in college, have inspired a passion and drive for increasing college access for communities of color and low-income communities. As a first-generation college student and eldest child to immigrant parents, she understands the struggles of navigating the higher education setting, especially as an introvert who is anxious to ask for help and talk to others. She hopes to become a source of support and mentorship that she always wished she had as the newest Shinnyo College Access Fellow.

24-25 Shinnyo College Access Fellow

Contact Information

For more information, contact Associate Director, Cassy Huang at cassy@berkeley.edu.