Studies in Success : Years of Work Pay Off in Degrees for UCI Graduates

They’ve studied for hours and taken test after grueling test. They’ve finished dozens of lab experiments, gulped canfuls of cola and turned in the last of their last-minute thesis papers.

Today, UC Irvine’s Class of 1994 will become alumni.

About 3,400 UCI seniors are scheduled to graduate in three ceremonies today. Another 640 graduate students also will receive their degrees.

Dressed in robes and mortarboards with tassels, they will accept their diplomas at Aldrich Park, a wooded retreat in the center of the Irvine campus.

Sixty more UCI undergraduates are graduating this year compared to last year, university officials said.

The 29th graduating class is the most ethnically diverse of any at UCI, university spokeswoman Dorothy Jean said. The breadth of cultures at the university is evident in the surnames of its award winners this year.

John O’Toole and Paul Urayima both were named as Barry M. Goldwater Scholars in sciences; Nguyen-Hong Hoang, a political science major, was selected as UCI’s first Harry S. Truman Scholar; mathematics student James Nunez received a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship; and Hoang and electrical engineering student Matthew Siler received UCI Lauds and Laurels Awards.

Students from three departments--engineering and physical and biological sciences--will go through commencement at 9 a.m. Social sciences students will follow at 1 p.m., and a 5 p.m. ceremony will honor students of fine arts, humanities, social ecology, interdisciplinary studies and information and computer science.

Chancellor Laurel L. Wilkening will speak briefly at all three ceremonies, Jean said. The ranks of the graduates count among them young women and men who want to return to inner cities to teach. Others are young entrepreneurs and entertainers. Some are parents, like a former professional singer from Mexico and mother of two who will get her diploma with highest honors in social ecology.

There are more than 4,000 stories among the Class of 1994. Here are a few of them.

Some people study at UCI so they can get jobs in traditional professional fields, such as finance or medicine. Eran Feigenbaum, a senior graduating with honors, studied electrical engineering there so he could make magic.

Feigenbaum, 22, tours clubs as a magician and performs in venues from Hollywood to Bora Bora. He never speaks during his shows; instead, he presents his illusions against a musical backdrop of songs by Sting, Madonna and other artists.

He learned his first magic tricks at age 6 from his grandfather, a former razor-blade-eating magician with a Russian circus. He remembers he didn’t take the illusions seriously, though, until age 12, when he saw a movie about a magician.

“I realized he was kissing all the girls,” Feigenbaum said, relaxing in his Turtle Rock home. “I decided it would be cool.”

Feigenbaum, a native of Tel Aviv, immigrated to New Jersey and picked up English when he was 16. He moved to Irvine and graduated from University High School. He worked at children’s parties and a few clubs on the weekends during his high school stint.

When it was time to choose a college, UCLA was Feigenbaum’s first choice. “It’s close to all the clubs in Hollywood,” he explains. But it was UCI that accepted him--and he said he is now glad he ended up in Irvine.

Feigenbaum notched as many as 20 shows each week during 3 1/2 years of college. The business’ demands kept him from living in a dormitory or participating in school clubs or activities.

“I missed that,” he said. “Sometimes I think I would’ve liked to be in a fraternity or something. But there’s a give and take there. Now I have both a career and an education.”

Few magicians have degrees in engineering, Feigenbaum said. “I chose electrical engineering, not so much because I knew what it was all about, but because it could easily be connected to magic,” he said.

Now he uses a laptop computer to run the lights, sound and prop cues for his shows. Electronics and theater classes have taught him what his light technicians must contend with during his performances.

Soon he’s going to try out another option: He applied to Pepperdine and USC law schools and plans to explore patent law. “I love talking and being in front of people,” Feigenbaum said.

But, regardless of whether he becomes a lawyer, he said he still will perform magic.

“If I’m not incredibly busy, I go crazy,” he said.

*

Twenty-five years ago, Irasema Venezia couldn’t imagine attending college, much less graduating. Repression in the land where she was raised--Nicaragua--forced her family to move to Mexico before she could finish secondary school, she said.

Now Venezia, 39, can relax in her Newport Beach apartment and worry about psychology papers instead of political instability. Books on career counseling and social behavior lie atop her glass coffee table, and she pokes at them as she talks flamboyantly in rapid-fire Spanish.

“I don’t think I’m going to the graduation,” she said, fiddling with a text. “I’ve already started some of my graduate work in USC’s counseling psychology program, and it’s as if I want to put things behind me.”

She and her husband shared child care of their two teen-age daughters, so she didn’t socialize much with classmates.

Venezia said she took a road to her degree that is far from typical. How many UCI graduates can say they were professional songstresses in Mexico?

She opens the drawer of a night table and pulls out dozens of tapes of songs she composed and performed.

“I worked three years with Televisa,” one of Mexico’s largest television networks, Venezia said. “I had my own weekly show.”

She also composed songs for several Latin American music festivals, she said. But the atmosphere was not ideal for her young daughters, she said, so she quit.

Venezia, who said she has never lived anywhere longer than five years, moved to Cancun and sold condominium time-shares. After she married her second husband and moved to Kansas in 1989, she took her first community college classes.

She continued taking courses at Orange Coast College when she and her family moved to Orange County in 1990.

UCI’s well-regarded social ecology program was the next step, and she garnered a number of honors at the school.

Part of her interest in psychology comes from her own childhood, when her worries about death were heightened by the mysticism prevalent in her family, Venezia said. “We lived in a little house near a church and I’d always see funerals, and people carrying dead people by,” she said.

“That may be why I’m thinking of working with terminally ill people. They’re the ones who really suffer emotionally.”

*

In one of UCI’s nondescript, earth-toned family housing units, Anthony Kutscher clutches his scrapbook and points to a picture of himself in 1976. Sporting bell-bottoms and long hair--much like the other band members of Sapient, his long-defunct Orange County rock group--he looks more like a partyer than a computer scientist.

The years have yellowed the picture and mellowed his rebellion. There was a time during his teen years, Kutscher said, when he was lucky to find a place to sleep, much less strive for a college education.

“I was supposed to go to Anaheim High School” to start 10th grade, Kutscher said. “But I never showed up for the first day of class. I had no use for it.”

Kutscher said he didn’t relate to his family, and he stayed behind in California at age 14 when the family moved to Minnesota. He took to sleeping in cars and friends’ garages, drinking and taking drugs, he said.

When he injured a knee and went to a hospital, a doctor put him on prescription drugs and ordered him not to drink alcohol. Stopping was so difficult, he said, he realized he was addicted.

“I put myself in a care unit in 1978,” he said, sitting on a couch beside his wife, Diana. “I realized it was a bad problem.”

His first wife divorced him after he stopped drinking and partying, he said, but he kept his three children--the oldest now 17 years old. He joined Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa, where he met Diana. They had a son, now 11 years old.

Gradually, he worked his way up from cleaning duties to become a machinist at 3M Orthopedics in Irvine. Faced with the specter of having to program high-tech computerized mills and lathes, he started taking computer classes.

But by his 13th year in machining, he became allergic to solvents and the company moved him to a lower-paying job.

“My wife said, ‘I think you should try going back to school,’ ” he said. “When I actually did it, she was pretty shocked.”

He attended Orange Coast College to take care of “seven pages of prerequisites,” he said, and finally arrived with a full-tuition scholarship at UCI in 1990.

Now he is finishing an honors project programming cutting-edge educational software for children. He received two departmental awards for excellence and has started a summer job at Rockwell International Corp.

Diana Kutscher, who will begin studying at UCI in September, sometimes has to urge him to take a break from work.

“You know there’s a problem when your kids start to call you Uncle Dad,” Anthony Kutscher said.

*

Jocelyn Vaughnes doesn’t want to be caught studying too much. Her whole approach, she said, is to relate her education to the off-campus world.

Take her senior thesis, for example.

“I interviewed teen women in central Orange County about their sexuality,” said Vaughnes, 22. “I found that so many people speak for teen women, but it’s very unusual their own voices are heard.”

She explored how young women see their bodies, how they make decisions about whether to have sex and how they express their sexuality--a project she worked on for 20 weeks.

Vaughnes, a San Bernardino native, said she decided to attend UCI because she was attracted by its social ecology program stressing psychology and social behavior. But she said she switched to women’s studies during her junior year so she could have the freedom to pursue research that she could relate to.

“I was kind of disappointed with the way my college life was going until then,” Vaughnes said. “People only got together to study for midterms or finals. Nobody really discussed things.”

In women’s studies, she often got together with fellow students to talk about poverty, inequity and social change.

“It’s sad to think that people have been here for four years and don’t really know their classmates,” she said.

When Vaughnes arrived at UCI in 1990, she had little idea what college really would be like, she said. She soon discovered that she was only one of about 300 African American women on the campus.

“It wasn’t so much that I felt isolated, I just felt more visible,” she said. “Other people could ditch and I couldn’t.”

In class, whenever the discussion turned to African American issues, all eyes turned to her as a spokeswoman. She doesn’t rebel against it--she answers questions and discusses her life as an African American woman--but she doesn’t feel comfortable in the role.

“There’s no such thing as one spokeswoman for African American women,” said Vaughnes, who now lives on Balboa Island.

Through talking with friends and professors, Vaughnes said she has finally found the nerve to speak her mind. She has participated in protests over student fees and went to Sacramento to speak with legislators in 1993.

She is concerned for the future of UCI and worries about its place in academia.

“When I first got here, you could go to the library (on the weekend) to study,” she said. “Now it’s only open from 1 p.m. to 6 p.m. on Saturdays. Services are really being cut.”

Vaughnes said she plans to stay in the world of academe. She’s now preparing to go to New York to teach poor elementary school students with the Teach for America program, but afterward she will pursue a graduate degree to become a professor, she said.

“I want to get my Ph.D.,” she said with conviction. “I want to teach, and I want to see women and people of color emphasized in what I do.”