Kevin McCarthy, who spent nine years and four months in solitary confinement, is a new member of the Berkeley student body this fall. “In order to see this day,” he said, “I had to force myself to remain positive during some very frustrating and discouraging times.”

Berkeley is known globally as a center of academic excellence, attracting the best and brightest students from the United States and the world.

Mayo is part of the Underground Scholars group at UC Berkeley. He's legally blind and has had to navigate an additional set of challenges during the pandemic. “We didn’t come this far to fail," he said. “So whatever our professors tell us at this point, we're gonna do. But at what cost?”