NU + You in SF

A guide to exploring the culture, history, tastes and stories of the San Francisco Bay Area.

[medillinsf]

Fireside Chat with Irene Edwards, Sunset Magazine Editor in Chief
Friday May 11, 2017 Medill alum Irene Edwards has known she wanted to be a magazine editor in chief ever since she toured Vanity Fair at age 13.

She shared insights on leading a 120-year-old magazine brand into a new era, earning a free MBA when she engineered the magazine’s sale to a private equity firm and why they’ve found an entirely new audience on social media.

She fielded questions from Northwestern SF students on the strongest content themes, adapting to innovations in digital design and how to make writing little content blurbs less tedious. < br/> Photos by Martin Backhauss of Sol Gate Studios 2018

[medillinsf]

California Academy of Sciences Excursion March 11, 2017

Natalie Hanson said the Sunday trip to the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park was a highlight of the quarter.

“The whole class got tickets to watch a planetarium show on Earthquakes together. We explored the three story rainforest full of butterflies and birds, and then went up to the rooftop garden and had a great view of Golden Gate Park. I learned that ants’ body types depend on how much nutrients they’re given when they’re born, and that some sea horses have leafy appendages to look like weeds at the bottom of the sea. “

[medillinsf]

Edible Schoolyard Private Tour and Berkeley Hike on March 14, 2018 Six determined students ventured out in the rain to Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School in Berkeley for a tour of The Edible Schoolyard.

Guide Hana Lee shared how chef Alice Waters’ desire to help students in her neighborhood appreciate fresh produce had become part of the curriculum in all Berkeley schools. Students asked questions about how it changed the way these students view gender roles and learned that attendance was close to perfect on garden education days. Walking to Codornices Park for a hike, they brainstormed an ad campaign to make eating vegetables cool.

We also stopped for pizza at the famous Cheeseboard Collective – student Jonathan Shiler declared it the best pizza of his life.

[medillinsf]

I loved learning about Berkeley's cooperation with experiential education and it's something I didn't know was a reality until this trip.

Rahul Parikh, Northwestern SF Winter 2018 student

[medillinsf]

Chocolate Art Bar Workshop on March 7, 2018

Winter quarter student Audrey Valbuena captured photos as the class worked with chocolatier Michael Recchiuti to design their own brand of chocolate art bars. Recchiuti shared insights on building a top chocolate brand in a competitive market like San Francisco.  

[medillinsf]

Oakland Museum of California + Off the Grid

July 28, 2017

BACKGROUND

Oakland is known for a great many things. Lovers of culture appreciate it for the Oakland Museum of California. Located not far from Lake Merritt, the museum is in a striking modern structure with an expansive sculpture garden. The rotating collections focus on local artists, historic artifacts by native people and thought-provoking explorations of pop culture. Fridays@OMCA add music, dancing, interactive events and Off the Grid food trucks to the mix.   We’ll check out the party and the Dorothea Lange photography exhibit.

SCHEDULE

6 p.m.  Meet at NU SF campus 1800 Montgomery Suite 1800

GETTING THERE

We’ll take BART to the Lake Merritt stop and walk two blocks to the museum. The trip should take about 25 minutes.

[medillinsf]

“Migrant Mother” is probably Dorothea Lange’s most recognizable photo. She says that she was drawn like a magnet to the woman, whose name is Florence Owens Thompson. In 1936, when this photo was taken, Thompson was 32 and had seven children. 

Photo credit: Dorothea Lange from Wikipedia entry

[medillinsf]

Dorothea Lange

Dorothea Lange was a photographer whose portraits of displaced farmers during the Great Depression greatly influenced later documentary photography.

The special exhibit at the Oakland Museum is a collection of photos by Dorothea Lange, who many consider the finest documentary photographer in U.S. history. Born in New Jersey, but based in the Bay Area, she specialized in capturing real and moving portraits of everyday people. Her work helped people understand the human toll of the Great Depression.

[medillinsf]

Suneel Gupta Entrepreneur Visit at Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers

May 23, 2017

101 S. Park St, San Francisco

BACKGROUND:  With his diverse background, Suneel Gupta is one of the most interesting entrepreneurs around. After earning a couple degrees from Northwestern University (JD and MBA), he worked in the Clinton White House as a speech writer -- ask for a demo of his Bill Clinton impression. He was the first VP of product development at Groupon, and went on to found Rise, an app that puts personal nutrition coaching on your iPhone. That business was acquired by health-tech startup One Medical last year. Suneel is currently teaching at Harvard Medical School while serving as entrepreneur in residence at Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield  & Byers.

SCHEDULE

2 p.m. Meet Suneel at KPCB offices

GETTING THERE…

On foot:  Walk to the offices near AT&T Park. Trip takes 25-30 minutes.

[medillinsf]

One Medical Acquires Rise, A Nutrition Coaching App

Much of Rise CEO Suneel Gupta and One Medical CEO Tom Lee's first interactions happened in front of a whiteboard at the One Medical offices after the pair..

One Medical, a primary healthcare group based in San Francisco, acquires Rise for a reported $20 million.

[medillinsf]

Suneel Gupta explains his Rise nutrition coaching app at TechCrunch Disrupt.

[medillinsf]

Suneel Gupta’s TedxSanDiego talk on the Kahani Movement, a storytelling project focused on Indian immigration to the U.S. in the 1960s and 70s.

[medillinsf]

Wearing Your Failures on Your Sleeve

In entrepreneurial circles, a start-up flop is now something to analyze and proclaim, not hide.

Suneel Gupta was a VP at Groupon when he appeared at the 2012 FailCon to talk about some of the company’s early mistakes. 

[medillinsf]

Summer of Love Guided Tour at deYoung Museum

May 5, 2017

deYoung Museum, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive, Golden Gate Park. 

SCHEDULE

12:30 p.m. Recommended time to leave from NU campus at 44 Montgomery to get to deYoung Museum in Golden Gate Park. Grab lunch in the cafe overlooking the sculpture garden

2:15 p.m. Meet docent Christina Kalman in the lobby

2:30 p.m. Guided tour begins 

WHAT TO WEAR

Comfortable shoes for walking around the museum... and maybe your favorite tie-dye. 

GETTING THERE…

By car:  Take a Lyft or Uber to Golden Gate Park. Trip takes 25-30 minutes.

By Public transit: Walk to Market and Montgomery and catch the 5R Bus toward Ocean Beach.  Get off at Fulton and 10th. Walk .2 miles to the deYoung at Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive. Trip takes about 40 minutes.

[medillinsf]

The Summer of Love Experience: Art, Fashion, and Rock & Roll will be an exhilarating exhibition of iconic rock posters, photographs, interactive music and light shows, costumes and textiles, ephemera, and avant-garde films.

#summeroflove

[medillinsf]

6 songs that embody the San Francisco Sound

The San Francisco Sound, as it came to be known, worked best in a dance hall, under the influence of psychedelics with a liquid light show and an unreadable concert handbill to take home. The sound was less successful in the recording studio, and mostly got airplay on the pioneering free-form radio station KMPX-FM if it aired anywhere at all. Album-wise among 1967 releases, only Jefferson Airplane’s “Surrealistic Pillow,” was able to bottle the city’s musical tones and it hold its own, even against the Beatles “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” the breakthrough album of the year. A structured single by the standards of the Fish, it has the requisite organ and guitar mix. Recorded in 1966, it was released following Big Brother’s heroics at the Monterey Pop Festival. “The Golden Road (To Unlimited Devotion)” by the Grateful Dead [...] it was the only song from the first album that managed to make it onto the band’s greatest hits album “Skeleton from the Closet,” which was released nearly a decade later in 1974. Oakland-born Bill Champlin, who graduated from Tamalpais High School in Mill Valley (along with Quicksilver guitarist John Cipollina), sang and played keyboards on this conventional pop-rock single, with vocal harmonies. When the Sons finally released an album in 1969, their sound had been funked up with horns and “Sing Me a Rainbow” wasn’t on it. Sam Whiting is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer.

[medillinsf]

Tracing the lineage of the phrase “Summer of Love”

On Feb. 6, 1967, Newsweek ran a four-page four-color spread under the headline “Dropouts on a Mission,” but there was no mention of the coming summer. [...] it differentiated good hippies as wearers of “quaint and enchanting costumes,” as opposed to bad hippies, “who live in filthy, crowded filthy pads,” block traffic and “becloud their minds with dangerous drugs.” Folklore has also attributed the catchphrase to the late promoter Chet Helms, who did not discourage people from calling him “The Father of the Summer of Love.” [...] Bob Cohen, Helms’ partner at the Avalon Ballroom, which operated on Sutter Street in the late ’60s during the height of the counterculture movement, doubts Helms created the phrase. Peter Albin, bassist for Big Brother & the Holding Company, also said he has no idea where the words came from, and concert poster artist Victor Moscoso only hazards a guess. “The phrase came from dealers and businessmen like Chet Helms,” Moscoso says. Three decades later, Bill Graham Presents, named after the iconic San Francisco promoter who produced concerts during the era, got into a tussle with Helms over ownership of the phrase, according to reports. The original trademark had lapsed, so Graham’s company registered “Summer of Love,” in order to use it for a 30th anniversary block party. Sam Whiting is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer.