He felt ‘lost’ as a nontraditional student. A decade later, he’s helped hundreds find their path.

Life was turning around for Dean Tanioka in 2016 — or so he thought. 

As an incoming transfer student at UC Berkeley, he looked forward to jumpstarting his academic life, which had sputtered over two years at an out-of-state private college. Returning to California was something of a homecoming for the former Los Angeles local. Stepping onto Sproul Plaza for the first time, surrounded by people who were changing the world, felt like a dream come true. 

But stress soon followed. In an era before new housing was available for transfer students, Tanioka couchsurfed with a family friend while scrolling Facebook ads for a place of his own. Then came the feeling of playing catch-up with brilliant peers who seemed to handle heavy course loads with ease, well-versed in the ins and outs of networking with strangers and competing for professional opportunities. He likened it to “a pressure cooker.” 

“I felt overwhelmed and kind of lost, literally and figuratively,” Tanioka said. “I kind of felt like I was missing something, like I was a step behind everyone else.”

Underlying all of it were creeping doubts about his own professional path. Until then, he’d held onto the idea of pursuing a career in medicine, a notion his family had instilled in him for as long as he could remember. He’d be the first doctor in the family, they told him. They’d called him “Dr. Dean” for as long as he could remember. 

But Tanioka was drowning in the science-heavy coursework on the pre-med path. Much as he wanted to make it all work, he felt like he didn’t deserve his seat at a prestigious place like Berkeley.  

“It was like the path was disappearing,” he said. 

He didn’t know it, but those struggles would soon reveal a new course — one he was particularly well-equipped to navigate. 

A necessary reset

As a boy growing up in Los Angeles, Tanioka wanted to become a firefighter, drawn to the profession’s camaraderie and teamwork. Medicine, his family reasoned, was a logical place to put teamwork and knowledge into action. Hence, “Dr. Dean.” 

He enrolled at Emory University but quickly felt out of place. It seemed he was the only person with a work-study position at the private research university. When finances got tight, he turned to a side hustle doing landscaping work — a job he was too embarrassed to tell anyone about.

He was overwhelmed and unfocused, and his interest in classes was waning. By the end of his first year, he felt like he was just wasting time and racking up debt. 

“It simultaneously felt like a predefined path to be the only doctor in the family,” Tanioka said. “And undefined, meaning I didn’t know if it was in my heart.” 

Seeking a return west and a fresh start, he did a stint at Santa Monica College before arriving at Berkeley as an incoming junior in 2016. But the imposter syndrome returned, as did struggles in a science-heavy curriculum. At the end of his first year at Berkeley, Tanioka accepted a six-month job at an education technology firm in Boston. It was a far cry from medicine and a long way from California. 

He didn’t tell many people, but he felt like he might never return. 

Yet with some distance from his academics, he met people who reframed what Berkeley could mean if he approached it differently, with a focus on community and curiosity instead of trying to live up to the expectations of others. He also reflected on how his background — growing up in a working, middle-class family still impacted by the legacy of Japanese internment camps — and mental health struggles might have affected his ability to move forward.

For the first time, he realized that he could not just try to ignore those realities but instead use them for good.

“It felt like a fresh start. It gave me perspective,” Tanioka said. “These are some of the things that I felt were part of my story, my journey, part of myself.”

‘Berkeley needed this’

When he returned to campus in spring 2018, Tanioka began working with Berkeley Underground Scholars, which helps people impacted by the criminal justice system to succeed in higher education. He also worked with the Teach in Prison program, tutoring incarcerated people at San Quentin.

It was as if being away from Berkeley taught him to embrace the things he’d valued all along — community and camaraderie. It also freed him to shift his focus from a pre-med route to a sociology major. The study of educational systems and social structures for underrepresented groups fascinated him and also helped illuminate the systems that had shaped much of his own journey. 

“It felt like I had this expansion of my brainpower and motivation because I felt I was able to relieve myself of the external pressure, the academic pressure,” Tanioka said. “It felt more true to my heart, wanting to do something that felt more like me.” 

He met Mac Hoang around that time, a colleague from Underground Scholars who had an idea to build a student-led course that would help incoming first-generation, nontraditional students navigate Berkeley’s “hidden curriculum.” Tanioka was a senior at the time with a full course load and mentoring roles, but he was drawn to Hoang’s idea.

“Berkeley needed this,” Tanioka said. He thought of the students who transferred, became overwhelmed, dropped out and returned home to the same service jobs they worked before college. He thought of those who held onto the expectations of others as they tried to make their way. He thought of students like him. 

Navigating Berkeley’s unwritten rules

NAVCAL, short for Navigating the University of California, Berkeley, gained early support from faculty sponsors and the Public Service Center. Hoang and Tanioka structured the curriculum around helping systemically marginalized students level the playing field with more privileged students. 

Meeting twice a week, students discuss assigned readings and also their own experiences around things like engaging professors during office hours or seeking research fellowships. They explore deep topics, like the role of power dynamics in education, the way one’s upbringing and surroundings influence their beliefs, and tools to gain confidence. And they demystify the unspoken rules of higher education, developing both the critical awareness and practical skills needed to thrive at Berkeley and beyond.

The class had 14 students the first semester. Additional funding allowed it to grow to 43. The following year it grew to 90, with a constantly growing waitlist. 

His influence shows up in how students move: more confident, more connected, and committed to building ladders of opportunity.

Fabrizio Mejia, interim vice chancellor for the Division of Equity and Inclusion

Approximately 1,000 students have taken the course since it launched in 2018. Tanioka said participants have received more than $16 million in scholarships and fellowships, and approximately two-thirds of students have secured paid opportunities, including research roles and employment, through networks and mentorship cultivated in the program. 

“What makes Dean uniquely situated to lead NAVCAL is that he understands the ‘hidden curriculum’ not as an abstract concept but as something he has lived and then re-engineered for others to benefit from,” said Fabrizio Mejia, Berkeley’s interim vice chancellor for the Division of Equity and Inclusion, where Tanioka works. “His influence shows up in how students move: more confident, more connected, and committed to building ladders of opportunity for those who come after them.”

This semester, there are 55 students enrolled and approximately 35 part-time peer mentors who work weekly with them. That’s in addition to roughly 100 students on campus who have taken the course and often give back in other ways, like informal conversations with their peers or sharing connections and resources.

“I felt there was this younger version of myself that needed this program. This was my calling to be of service to that prior version of me,” Tanioka said. “In many ways, it helped because that shared history fostered the trust that our students needed.”

Fueling social mobility on campus — and nationwide

Tanioka sees his role as reminding enrolled students that they have the right to occupy space on campus — one of the program’s four tenets, along with “community not competition,” “each one teach one,” and “a togetherness approach.”

“NAVCAL students are the underdogs of Berkeley, and they’re the ones who are going to help promote change in society,” said Tatiana Butte, a former participant and mentor. Since graduating in 2024, Butte has worked for the California governor’s office and local government in San Diego County; she recently accepted a full ride to Georgetown University’s master of public policy program. “I cannot thank Dean enough. Obviously, grit and hard work will carry you far, but the right allies make all the difference.”

Esme Nuno Mora, who experienced bouts of housing instability as a child, long saw community college as her dream school. But while attending Norco College in Riverside County, she decided to apply to Berkeley. Much to her surprise, she got in. 

NAVCAL students are the underdogs of Berkeley.

Tatiana Butte, NAVCAL alum

Mora joined the HOPE Scholars program, which supports students who experienced homelessness or foster care. Feeling overwhelmed, she joined NAVCAL and connected with Tanioka, an advocate who saw how her story could help her find her purpose. 

“NAVCAL just helps you accept yourself,” she said.

Today Mora is majoring in sociology, preparing to graduate next month. She’s weighing offers for public policy graduate programs, with the goal of working in education policy to strengthen support systems for homeless youth. 

“NAVCAL helped me understand that getting into Berkeley wasn’t a mistake,” Mora said. “They helped me switch my perspective from feeling like an imposter to understanding what value I bring to Berkeley.”

Participants say one of NAVCAL’s greatest strengths is its network of alumni who have taken the course, many of whom are current Berkeley students. What they lack in age or professional careers they make up for in their ability to identify with challenges facing first-generation students from systemically marginalized groups. They’ve lived it.

That’s what appealed to Johnny Smith in his opening days on campus in 2019. Smith, who is formerly incarcerated, learned about a budding NAVCAL program through Berkeley’s Underground Scholars program during an orientation event that fall. A transfer student from Santa Rosa Junior College, Smith was grappling with Berkeley’s “culture shock.” 

What started as a class connection morphed into a deep friendship with Tanioka. They shared experiences and struggles as transfer students and research interests in sociology and criminal justice. In the ensuing years, Smith excelled at Berkeley, in large part, he said, because Tanioka and NAVCAL showed him it was possible. 

Smith majored in sociology and is now a Ph.D. student at Harvard, where he’s researching policies around background checks for people recently released from prison. In his Cambridge office hangs the Sociology Departmental Citation Award he received at his 2023 graduation.

When he looks at it, he’s reminded of his walk across the Zellerbach Hall stage and grows noticeably emotional. Tanioka was in the audience for Smith that day, one of the only guests Smith invited who showed up to celebrate his achievement.

“I don’t think offering that generosity and support is something specific to me, either,” Smith said, pausing to reflect on his enduring friendship with Tanioka. “I think that’s who he is as a person — an authentic reflection of his true character.”

‘We belong in these spaces’

NAVCAL has evolved dramatically since it started eight years ago. Tanioka graduated with his sociology degree in 2019 and has overseen the program ever since. Its reach has grown exponentially, with new students enrolling each semester and a growing network of alumni eager to offer their help anytime. 

But as much as it’s grown, it’s become smaller. Tanioka is the only full-time staff member overseeing the twice-weekly course, an array of peer mentors and numerous administrative responsibilities. Federal funding is slated to expire next year, leaving the fate of the program in jeopardy and Tanioka’s income in question. He has dreams of expanding the program across the UC system, but those remain in limbo, too. 

That uncertainty doesn’t show as he walks around campus. He’s charismatic, and with a decade at Berkeley, he regularly sees familiar faces on Sproul Plaza. 

Asked what keeps him going, Tanioka takes a pause before answering. 

He said he sees reflections of himself in each semester’s class and wonders how his own trajectory would have been different if a program like NAVCAL existed when he arrived in those first uncertain days in 2016. 

Then he thinks of the successes of people like Smith at Harvard and of Mora and Butte.

“NAVCAL can be and is that vehicle to move the world in a direction that benefits everyone,” Tanioka said. “Berkeley is fortunate to have us here. We are what make this place such a unique institution of higher education because of our experiences, our stories and our perspectives.”

It’s something he tells his class each semester, but it also extends beyond the classroom. 

“I’m also saying this to me.”