{"id":258847,"date":"2026-04-09T05:53:09","date_gmt":"2026-04-09T05:53:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/258847\/"},"modified":"2026-04-09T05:53:09","modified_gmt":"2026-04-09T05:53:09","slug":"he-felt-lost-as-a-nontraditional-student-a-decade-later-hes-helped-hundreds-find-their-path-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/258847\/","title":{"rendered":"He felt \u2018lost\u2019 as a nontraditional student. A decade later, he\u2019s helped hundreds find their path."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Life was turning around for Dean Tanioka in 2016 \u2014 or so he thought.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>As an incoming transfer student at UC Berkeley, he looked forward to jumpstarting his academic life, which had sputtered over two years at an out-of-state private college. Returning to California was something of a homecoming for the former Los Angeles local. Stepping onto Sproul Plaza for the first time, surrounded by people who were changing the world, felt like a dream come true.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>But stress soon followed. In an era before\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/news.berkeley.edu\/2024\/07\/29\/introducing-uc-berkeleys-anchor-house-a-remarkable-gift-built-especially-for-transfer-students\/\" rel=\"noreferrer nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">new housing<\/a>\u00a0was available for transfer students, Tanioka couchsurfed with a family friend while scrolling Facebook ads for a place of his own. Then came the feeling of playing catch-up with brilliant peers who seemed to handle heavy course loads with ease, well-versed in the ins and outs of networking with strangers and competing for professional opportunities. He likened it to \u201ca pressure cooker.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI felt overwhelmed and kind of lost, literally and figuratively,\u201d Tanioka said. \u201cI kind of felt like I was missing something, like I was a step behind everyone else.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Life was turning around for Dean Tanioka in 2016 \u2014 or so he thought.\u00a0 As an incoming transfer&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":258848,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[143,145,144],"class_list":["post-258847","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258847","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258847"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258847\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/258848"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258847"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258847"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258847"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}