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Junzhe Cao

College Writing R4B

Dr. Carmen Acevedo Butcher

October 1, 2022

My name is (曹, 俊喆) Junzhe Cao, but I go by Clarkson. My first name in

Chinese means to be both handsome and lucky. I am one of the 12% international

students according to the “Of Every 100 Undergrads” in the Office of the Vice

Chancellor of Finance website. Born and raised in Shanghai, I relied heavily on

public transportation and eventually came to love it for its efficiency as well as its

inexpensive nature. Finding good deals is a common thread between my interests.

Transportation has been my most enduring interest- I have carried it from my

childhood. My earliest encounter with transportation was when I was about 8 years

old: I was on the shuttle bus to the RT-Mart in Shanghai. [Figure 1] As I grew up, I

began to recognize the differences between bus models I’d encounter on various trips.

I would frequently ask my grandmother to take me to the terminal station, not to get

to a particular destination necessarily, but instead just to ride on many of the newly

opened lines/extensions that were always being constructed. Being one of the first

passengers to embark on a new train route is an incredibly unique experience. I

clearly remember staring at trains merging back into the middle lane at the end of the

new platform, watching them as they would come back from the other side of the

platform, feeling the whole time as though I had been exploring uncharted territory.

After some time, with at most a map I would guide myself through a complex

network of transfers and pathways deep under the ground, feeling confident in

knowing exactly where I was heading. Through my many trips, I naturally became
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interested in collecting train tickets, train cards, and everything else train related.

Figure 2 shows part of the collection that I have been building up until this day.

[Figure 2]

My identity is wrapped in being an enthusiast in railway, metro and

aeroplanes, finding hacks, and the fact that I consider myself as a “Global Citizen”.

This can be seen in my autoethnographic essay “Shanghai Speed in and between the

Stations: My Life” (Click Me for the Essay). On the other side of the transportation

geek and award hacker, I recently find myself having confirmation bias: I tend to put

an emphasis in my thinking on things that support my ideas while simultaneously

ignoring the things that conflict them. In other words, I want things to happen the way

“I like them to be''. I want to have all the relevant information available, whether it is

the bus real-time schedule or the menu of the residential dining hall. I want to know

everything that is related (or sometimes unrelated) to me. With the huge amount of

information presented to us all every day, I find it hard not to be this way, especially

because I have to be very self-responsible. To me, being aware of the information

around me is part of “pushing myself”.

The toughest hardship I have been through to this day is actually how I got to the

place I am at the moment. I am a junior standing student majoring in civil

engineering. I have heard many people complain about the difficulty of the college

application process–I can relate to this, because it was especially difficult for me. As

an international student, I had to push myself especially hard in order to boost my

“package” in comparison to the rest of the Chinese students competing for the same

spot. Around 7.6 percent of the students were accepted into the College of

Engineering in for the academic year of 2021-2022.(Click Me for the link) I

remember the days after I decided to shift from the US AP curriculum to the UK A-
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Levels curriculum following a 2 in AP United States History. This was when I needed

to learn calculus from scratch, in English. Meanwhile, I needed to balance

extracurricular activities, community service, and competitions. It always felt like one

wrong move could cost me the entire game. I always was able to source a great

amount of determination from the words of poet Cheng Gu, from a poem in the

collection of <一代人>(One Generation):黑夜给了我黑色的眼睛, 我却用它寻找光

明( Night gave me dark eyes, but I used them to find light. ). Page after page, I

managed to achieve A* in every subject that I took, using the guiding principle of that

poem to learn all of the fundamentals I know today.

The experience for me with UC Berkeley is both stressing and fruitful. I took

COLWRIT R1A with Dr. Carmen Acevedo Butcher in Fall 2021, during my first

semester at Berkeley. As difficult as it was, I managed to turn those failing essays into

passing ones through the combination of devoting more time (30 hours per week in

the end), help from classmates and professors (Click Me for the Peer Review

Worksheets), Student Learning Centre Weekly Tutoring (with Vi, Click Me for the

Agreement) and, surprisingly, transportation. BART cured me some Friday nights

when I was feeling broken. After taking it, like what I did in Shanghai, for a few

stops, gazing at the posters in the stations, I walk outside of the station, feeling a

different person from the one that walked in. At the end of the semester, looking the

first draft and the final one side by side, I cannot believe that they were written by the

same person.

I try to put this same energy into my financial decisions. The way I purchase is

different from many of the people I have met. I hunt for deals. I am desperate for the

concept of “value for money” due to the fact that I am not rich in the first place.

Through these years, I have come to believe more and more the idea of “achieving the
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maximum happiness using the same amount of money or using the least amount of

money to achieve the same happiness”. An example of that would be the aeroplane

ticket that I purchased for my flight to go back to the United States at the beginning of

the semester. I booked a ticket six months ago (with fully refundability to secure the

deal well) which cost me around $800. The itinerary contained two transfers, both

over 6 hours, but as a person with a passion for transportation, this only improved the

deal. Even still, as the calendar was nearing the departure date, I found out that United

Airlines (the only airline operating non-stop flight between Shanghai and San

Francisco) was releasing reward seats (for miles redemption).I used miles from

Avianca’s Lifemiles, with the full coupon and promotion, to secure a nonstop ticket

for around $600 (Click Me for the Ticket). The person sitting next to me was literally

paying $5500.

At the same time as hunting those deals, I got hooked into the blogs and video

sites. I registered a WeChat Official Account in order to post some blogs [WeChat

Article: Transportation | Race on the Underground: Direct or Transfer?] and YouTube

for a simple tutorial on the flight fare website itaMatrix. [YouTube video: EP-01

[Travel Hacks from Cal Student] ita Matrix powered by Google]. I joined the

transportation team here at Berkeley and worked my way up the ladder. I am now lead

of the planning sub-team, one of three main groups in the club. I am also doing

research on the effect of electrical vehicles (EVs) in the city of Commerce, California

with Dr. Elliot Martin at a research centre in the Institute of Transportation Studies

here at Cal. I wish to research advertisements in transportation facilities, or more

specifically, the effect of advertisements on people taking public transportation. Gary

Richards, traffic reporter from The Mercury News, said that people “feel vulnerable in

the system”. (Richards) Why are people rather stuck on the Bay Bridge than taking
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the BART? Can we make people feel safer riding BART by creating a hotline for

whistle-blowers [Figure 3]? Or can we add the art found in Embarcadero [Figure 4]?

More specifically, I would like to see if there is a way to increase ride numbers of

public transportation through posters/ advertisements in the infrastructures, whether it

is “Buy this Product” or “See Something, Say Something”.

Choo choo, from Shanghai to Berkeley, I managed to travel far on a budget, got

myself into one of the most prestigious universities and got to the place where I am

today. I won’t forget who I am, and I will never let hardship defeat me. I will continue

researching on transportation, for the good of increase mobility and accessibility of

the public transportation system in the United States, until the day when I won’t have

any fear riding BART.

You can also find this document at https://junzhecao.weebly.com/project-1.html

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Figure 1: RT-Market Shuttle Bus from Still dreaming about the tri-set in the

Bund? This free supermarket shuttle bus will bring you into another part of Shanghai.

Photo by Peng Lin, Laiqi Ye, and Peng Zhang.

Figure 2: Some of My Collection of Transportation Cards/Tickets.

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Figure 3: On a train walkthrough Chief Alvarez asked a passenger whose mask

was down around his neck to wear it properly. We can see the hotline between the

two windows on the right. Photo by MARIA J. AVILA.

Figure 4: “Have a ___ Day” installed at Embarcadero Station. Photo courtesy of

Jennifer Easton.
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Works Cited

Berkeley, UC. “Of Every 100 Undergraduates.” Opa – University of California

Berkeley, https://pages.github.berkeley.edu/OPA/our-berkeley/100-

students.html.

Cao, Junzhe, and Yunwei Hu. “Transportation | Race on the Underground: Direct or

Transfer?” WeChat Official Account, 24 June 2021,

https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s?__biz=Mzg3OTY0MzExOA&mid=2247483688&

idx=2&sn=99e6c8f07230038cf424fb24bff7238a&chksm=cf0011a9f87798bf6

4c94b84bdd152f0f03a2f0d969c3079e4ad123799380a0db3f9996f9436&token

=2028951356&lang=zh_CN#rd.

Chen, Jun, and Youlei Chi. “Still Dreaming about the Tri-Set in the Bund? This Free

Supermarket Shuttle Bus Will Bring You into Another Part of Shanghai.”

Edited by Di Wu, Vista See the World, BiliBili, 2 Mar. 2022,

https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1mY411G7uU/?vd_source=d58e188392f4

348c09f4d48c60b75927.

Gu, Cheng. “Yidairen (One Generation).” Hei Yan Jing (Black Eyes).

Jordan, Melissa. “Bart Police Chief Ed Alvarez on How to Build a Progressive Policing

Presence.” Bay Area Rapid Transit, BART Communications, 5 Feb. 2021,

https://www.bart.gov/news/articles/2021/news20210205.

Lambert, Walker, and Hyunsoo Kang. “Local Design Students Invigorate Market Street

BART Stations with Colourful Designs.” Bay Area Rapid Transit, 22 July 2022,

https://www.bart.gov/news/articles/2022/news20220718.

Richards, Gary. “'Here Are My Two Requirements for Getting Back on Bart,' A

Roadshow Reader Says.” The Mercury News, The Mercury News, 4 Sept. 2022,
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https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/09/02/bart-beefing-up-presence-on-train-

lines-to-improve-safety-address-riders-concerns-roadshow/.

“Prospective Freshman Faqs.” Berkeley Engineering, 21 Mar. 2022,

https://engineering.berkeley.edu/admissions/undergraduate-

admissions/prospective-freshman-faqs/.