Hi everyone!
Last year, I joined a March Madness bracket pool with my fraternity brothers, our partners, and one wildcard: one of my fraternity brothers’ grandpa (aka Gramps). At the end of it, Gramps absolutely obliterated us, so this year, when we saw he joined again, we all collectively decided that it was everyone vs. him. Now, let it be known that I am not a sports person, and I have never done well in March Madness. However, I will 100% join a March Madness Bracket Pool because of FOMO. My strategy this year consisted of picking UConn to win because Rylee graduated from there (Duh!)
Naturally, as the first round of 64 ended, I was firmly in last place (8th), and Gramps was in first, making it feel like we were looking at an inevitable repeat of last year. But as the rounds progressed, something peculiar started to happen. I slowly moved up the leaderboards as my fellow compatriots’ brackets fell apart. By the end of the second round, I was in 7th. By the end of the Sweet Sixteen, I jumped to 4th, and by the end of the Elite Eight, I clawed my way to 2nd, trailing right behind Gramps.
All our eyes were on the Final Four Game between Arizona and Michigan. If Arizona won, Gramps would take the title of champion of the NCAA Nelly Jr. for the second year in a row, but if Michigan pulled off a win, I would usurp Gramps’ throne. Our Discord channel lit up with hype messages as the game began, only for it to become clear, pretty quickly, that Michigan would dominate. As the dust settled, I had the last bracket standing.
Gramps was a worthy opponent, and never in a million years would I have believed you if you told me that besting him would come down to me. While I highly doubt I will ever win a March Madness Bracket Pool ever again, this is a moment that will live in infamy forever in my mind.
And with that said, let’s find out what else is up with Will…
To start the week, I ran into this fluffy little guy on campus as part of an Easter Eggstravaganza event! They were charging $5 to pet the bunnies, but I feel like charging broke college students is not a sound business model. What do I know?
Changing gears to what I do know, I loved the lip-sync assignment last semester so much that I had to incorporate it into my public speaking class. I started this week with a workshop day for the lip-sync assignment, to watch them in class the next day, but after discussing with the students, I moved the deadline for the project to next week.
Teaching is something that is always in flux, and I believe it is something that should be negotiable with students. We are approaching the end of the semester, so I know that the responsibilities in other classes are piling up. I can see how some might argue that dialoguing with students can ultimately lead them to taking advantage of your generosity, but I choose to believe that students will tell you what they really need and how able they are to complete an assignment if given the opportunity.
Instead of watching the lip-sync videos, on the second day of class, we focused on persuasion in preparation for the final speech of the semester, a persuasive speech. For class, I asked them several questions and required them to pick a side and argue for it. I was worried about how it would turn out, but this was probably the most engaged they have ever been. It makes me wonder how I can continue to foster engaged group discussions outside of a debating activity.
(Side Note: I was talking to the students, and the word “unc” came up. I asked what “unc” meant, and they said that essentially it was that you were out of touch with what is going on in pop culture. After I heard that, I was like, “Oh! So I am unc!” and the students all laughed.)
In Methods, we started class by working through an example of Braun and Clarke’s Reflexive Thematic Analysis, which included discussing several key approaches in qualitative research (Byrne, 2021). We looked at the difference between essentialism, which focuses on capturing participants’ meanings as they are expressed, and constructionism, which considers how those meanings are shaped by broader social patterns. We also compared experience-centered approaches, which prioritize people’s lived experiences, with critical approaches that situate those experiences within larger frameworks like gender, race, sexuality, and historical or economic context.
We then moved into inductive versus deductive analysis. Inductive approaches are more “bottom-up,” building ideas and theory from the data itself, while deductive approaches are “top-down,” applying existing theories from the researcher’s perspective. We talked about semantic coding, which focuses on what is explicitly said, and latent coding, which goes deeper into underlying meanings and assumptions. Finally, we reviewed proper transcript formatting, timestamps, speaker labels, and verbatim transcription. Our in-class verbatim transcription activity for one minute of an interview took around 8 minutes, showing just how time-intensive transcription can be.
At one point, the professor wanted to organize us into groups. After no one volunteered, I suggested we count off. That, in hindsight, was a mistake. For the next minute, we struggled to get through a single count, restarting multiple times as people called out wrong numbers, forgot where we were, or even skipped others entirely. Through this experiment, we settled an important question: Do graduate communication studies students know how to count? The answer, it turns out, is definitely no.
This week, the Giants hosted San Francisco State University at Oracle Park for SFSU Night! (Fun Fact: I actually went to SFSU Night last year before I got accepted.)
The Giants were playing against the Philadelphia Phillies, which I thought was extremely ironic, and here’s why. Last year, I applied to grad schools across the country, as we had no clue where Rylee would find work. In the end, Rylee got two job opportunities, one in Philadelphia and the other in the Bay Area. I also got into both Drexel (in Philadelphia) and SFSU, so for a while, moving to Philly was a very real possibility. Can you imagine that? Life would have been drastically different, mainly because it would have been so much colder. That being said, there’s that quote about how “the coldest winter was a summer in San Francisco”, so maybe the cold is inescapable.
Seb, Judith, and Linda (all fellow SFSU graduate students) joined us as we witnessed the Giants kick the Phillies’ butts 6-0. It really feels poetic, and an obvious indicator that we made the right decision.
This week, I had another one of my patent-pending Will Willis Day Trips. This time, though, my excursions were because of school.
Next week, my gender studies class was cancelled, and the assignment for the week was to go to one of two museums. I decided to get a head start on this assignment this week and go to the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive to see the exhibit “Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Multiple Offerings”, a 25-year retrospective of this UC Berkeley alumna (funny how the only time I seem to not procrastinate is when I have to go to museums).
Cha’s Multiple Offerings spans multiple mediums, including text, performance, film, and photography. One second, you might be looking at a photograph of a performance, and the next, a VCR plays one of Cha’s works on loop. Cha has this beautiful way of showcasing how textual art can be. She imbues even the simplest of phrases with meaning, emphasizing concepts such as memory, language as both a barrier and a medium, identity, as well as what’s not there, with the use of silence and negative space. Cha, however, understood the audience as integral to the creation of meaning in her works and embraced what she called “Multiple Telling”. As we learn in communication studies about how meaning is created, primarily the inherently constitutive (meaning-making) nature of communication, I think Cha’s work keenly reflects this complex, collaborative process through which understanding is formed.
Afterwards, I was off to Piedmont for La Loulou Wine Bar, a Parisian-inspired wine bar. La Loulou was filled with bright colors, and an exclusively French wine list. There was absolutely no California Cabernet to be found. I ended up grabbing a glass of Colombard, a grape generally used for blending with Sauvignon Blanc or Chardonnay. However, the occasionally adventurous winemaker will let it shine by itself, and the even more adventurous wine bar owner will add it to its menu. This was strictly for research purposes, of course. When studying wine, it is very important to go around to the various wine shops around the Bay, or at least that is what I tell myself.
To reward myself for being so studious, I made a stop next door at Fenton’s Creamery. Fenton’s is an institution in Oakland, founded back in 1894, and has such a cultural impact that it was featured in Pixar’s Up (remember the end scene where Carl and Russell get ice cream? The ice cream shop they are sitting outside of is Fenton’s.) On a personal note, it is one of my favorite ice cream shops that I never visit enough.
In honor of winning gold at the 2026 Olympics, Fenton’s not only gave Alysa Liu “free ice cream for life” but also released “Alysa’s Gold”, her very own ice cream flavor, featuring caramel ice cream with crushed golden Oreos and a caramel swirl! I can only imagine that this is what victory tastes like when an Olympian bites down on a gold medal. (Side Note: I also hope to one day be cool enough to have my own ice cream flavor named after me.)
To round out our Bay Area Restaurant Week tour de force, we headed into the City itself, San Francisco, for SFRW 2026 (that’s San Francisco Restaurant Week for anyone who is just tuning in). Our stop of choice was Teakwood, a Burmese spot in Hayes Valley. It has been a while since we have had stellar Burmese food, so the pressure was on.
Our three-course Restaurant Week Meal started with a crab and purple cabbage salad. It was light, crisp, and refreshing with just enough spice to keep it interesting. We then followed that up with a spicy, crispy beef covered with veggies and a chili crisp sauce alongside tofu vegetable udon noodles. Finally, for dessert, we got a cup of coconut ice cream, which was smooth and laden with coconut flakes. This was slightly atypical of our normal order, but bomb regardless and a reminder of how dynamic Burmese cuisine can be.
After lunch, we stopped by the Orpheum Theater for its 2026 Open House. For each show in the upcoming ATG SF season, they hosted a special activation as well as an opportunity to step on stage! While I was excited to engage in a stage combat production for The Outsiders and enjoy a cocktail mixing lesson for The Great Gatsby, we got stuck in the dressing room almost the entire time when I volunteered to be a model for a drag makeup tutorial for Death Becomes Her.
For the next hour, the drag queen Vanilla Meringue worked her magic, beating my face into oblivion, which is quite the complex process. She first glued down my eyebrows, then applied foundation (I was told I have a neutral tone), and then drew on new eyebrows. Next came the application of clown white face paint, the same stuff clowns use. She followed up with an assortment of makeup products, including contour and blush carefully applied from the side of my face inward, glitter dusted under the eyebrows and on the nose for an extra bit of pop, then mascara, eyeliner, and lip liner. I might be forgetting a few steps along the way, but by the end, I was blown away by the result. Who is this diva???
Along the way, I gained a newfound appreciation for the attention to detail makeup requires. It truly is a LABOR of love and an art form in and of itself, except instead of a piece of cloth or paper, your face is the canvas.
My makeup also made for a fun ride home on the BART.
There’s some contempt towards the Michelada by a sizable portion of my friends, but I know that there are now two people who love them: Robert Pattinson and I.
