Kristina Hernandez:  

Life ________________________________________ After high school, I played keyboard and bass in a few different bands for a while and worked as a manager at a record shop. Music was my life. A few years later I went on to study anthropology at AVC after taking every class there was available with a certain teacher who really inspired me (thanks Roger). I got my AA with honors and had an all around great experience there, especially doing archaeology field work with Roger and the rest of the gang in the AV Archaeological Society. ________________________________________ From there I was accepted to UC Berkeley with a couple of scholarships. As sad as I am to say this, though, I really hated it there. No offense to the smart and respectful Berkeley fans and alumni. The campus and area are beautiful, but more often than not I felt like I was surrounded by pretentious people who were arrogant about their intellect but lacked some real life experience outside of school to temper their attitudes. I know it sounds harsh, but I didn't appreciate hearing Berkeley students and teachers putting down other schools and their students, especially since I knew people who had 4.0 GPAs and didn't get accepted to Berkeley because there were "too many in their ethnic group" who had already been accepted. Berkeley has great resources, absolutely, but I think there's a fine line between confidence and arrogance and a lot of people up there didn't seem to know where that line was. ________________________________________ Anyway, I did get to spend a short time in some great classes at Berkeley (like my Museum Curation class - that class alone would have tempted me to stay). Still, it wasn't enough. Joining the Anthropological Society and then having the president start off the first meeting with a cheer (actually spelling out the word "anthropology") was the last straw for me. I had also had a lot more archaeology field work experience with Roger and the guys at AVC and was very disappointed that Berkeley didn't allow you to take part in field work classes until you were a senior. So that was it. To the sadness, disappointment and bewilderment of friends and mentors, I finished up my first exams and papers with A's and B's (that helped me feel like I left on good note) and I got the hell outta' there! ________________________________________ Having left Berkeley, I then transferred to my actual first university choice: UCLA... and I loved it as much as I always knew I would. :-) People even Studied in the common rooms there. :-) I started out terrific but in the end I let some personal situations disrupt me during my last quarters there and in the end I left just before graduating. ________________________________________ The upside to all that 20-something turmoil and drama was that after I had finally dealt with everything, I ended up going and traveling in a way I probably never would have before, having been on the path I was previously. I back-packed through parts of the US, Canada, throughout Europe, Ireland, and England. I slept in train stations, stairwells, airports, even a bathtub in a dorm. One of my favorite adventures, though, was the year I dragged along two good friends from Berkeley and we were out on the streets with no place to stay during the Christmas season in New York. Because I had offered help to a stranger with her bags, we ended up being taken in and given a place to stay, spending Christmas Eve with a really nice group of actors and artists. This, of course, isn't the sort of thing I'd recommend to everyone but I've just had some fantastic adventures and I'll tell you, there's no better way to be an anthropologist! ________________________________________ A few years later, during one of my birthday adventure trips, I met my husband (who is German). We met in Hartford, Connecticut, spent a couple of days together there and then ended up traveling the upper east coast into Canada for 3 weeks. The serendipitous situations that brought and kept us together that whole time made for a "how-did-you-two-meet" story that sounds like it's a work of fiction. A good tale to tell to the kids down the road (even if they end up just being my neices' kids and not my own grand-kids.) Anyway, so after that trip we kept up a long distance relationship for about 3 years, he coming to visit me in California once or twice a year and I going to Ge...Expand for more