Please note that all Sierra College locations will observe summer hours from May 26 to August 8, and will be closed on Fridays now through Friday, Aug. 8, 2025.
Serhii Demchuk (second from right) and his winning team proudly hold their prize.
Team Wins $10,000 Grand Prize
Sierra College computer science major Serhii Demchuk and his team tied for first place in the 2023 Brembo Hackathon held this month in Sunnyvale, Calif.
Brembo is a world leader in manufacturing braking systems for most motorsports and high-performance cars, and according to Demchuk, “The event combined both my passions of cars and coding, so it was a no brainer [to participate].”
He added that his main goal of registering for the event was to learn more about Artificial Intelligence and machine learning.
Working on a team of four with students from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Chicago, whom he first connected with at the event, Demchuk helped create synthetic data to train and improve Brembo’s warranty classification system.
The team was graded 50 percent on technical ability and 50 percent on presenting their solution within a four-minute timeframe to the board of executives at Brembo.
“Going from a business communications class at Sierra to presenting to the CEO and executive board of an international €3.6 billion euro a year company is a MASSIVE step, yet my team and I were comfortable,” said Demchuk. “It felt like a Shark Tank episode.”
He added, “The best moment was seeing the impressed looks of the board at our results. In one category we had improved their system by 466 percent with our data.”
When Demchuk’s team was named as one of two first place winners, he said, “It was a crazy rush of a feeling, but we worked hard to get there.” In fact, after the awards presentation, Brembo executives and engineers took notice and asked Demchuk to send his resume their way.
Demchuk, who is also a tutor at Sierra College, will be transferring to California State University, Sacramento next semester.
Sierra Mickelson, Alexa Topacio, Luis-Antonio Carreon, Ryder Bouck, and Ethan Yamaguchi were recognized as 2023 Emerging Journalist Fellowship students.
Sierra College Foundation works to support students so they can be successful in school. Watch this video to meet a few Sierra College students and staff as they share their personal stories about how generosity has helped them meet their goals.
Andi* struggled with substance abuse at age 14. Expelled from high school, she had no family support and ended up staying with friends. She attended continuation school, but high school graduation was a big “if” for her. Attending college was never in the picture.
Through Sierra Promise, Andi took a field trip to Sierra College. She toured many departments but was especially inspired by the Nursing Village. Suddenly, for the first time in her life, she knew what she wanted to do.
She wasn’t sure how to make it happen, but she worked hard in high school and successfully kicked her drug addiction. Despite earlier worries that she wouldn’t graduate, she did – and ahead of schedule.
With the assistance of Sierra Promise staff, she focused on how to attend Sierra College. Her Sierra Promise counselor helped with every stage – from filling out the application to completing her FAFSA application, and even driving her to take assessment tests.
Andi was overwhelmed and a bit terrified, but she began college at Sierra and has already successfully finished her first semester. She said it has been tough, but worth it. She’s excited for her future.
Meet Maria Brannan, a proud veteran who is also a Sierra College alum. She works in Sierra College’s Veteran Success Center to assist other veterans who are furthering their education at Sierra College. Watch Maria’s story.
I graduated from Folsom High School in 1972. I always wanted to go to College. Sierra College was the College I wanted to attend, however I had different circumstances and just did not have the courage to apply and go. I ended up moving to the Bay Area-Oakland in particular because I had to work and help to support my Mother.
I was recruited to learn to be an Escrow Officer at a major Title Insurance Company – Transamerica. I always wanted to return to live in Sacramento and go to Sierra College. My parents separated and my Dad who retired at Mather Air Force Base, left my Mother and four children. She was forced to go on Welfare and I had to finish my 12th year of High School. I did leave and move and continued for many years to come back to Sacramento to see and help my Mother.
It was not until thirty years later that I decided to move back with my three kids and go to Sierra College. I lived in the foothills near my sister – Nevada City/Grass Valley and started in Spring of 2003. I took an Art class because I thought it would be fun. Then I realized that I was afraid of learning due to a disability of processing and reading. It took me going to Sierra College until 2010 before I went into the Disabled Student Services to be tested for learning disabilities. I was tested and given services. The primary problem I have is having enough time to read and being an auditory learner. This meant that I received books on tapes for my classes and extra time with exams in order to read at the slow difficult pace I had. The good news is my reading did improve, but the disability will be something I will always have to work extra to overcome.
At the beginning I had three children as young as 5th grade and oldest in 9th grade, so it was difficult going to school and working full time. It was not until I got really serious and took more than one class that I knew I would attain an Associate of Art degree in 2015. I also was admitted to UC Davis for the fall of 2016 as well, however my husband was transferred to Tucson Arizona. I am now going to school to finish a Bachelor of Studio Art – BFA in the Spring of 2017. I will continue on – God willing and work to get a Masters level as well…
Sierra College is such a great Community College and through the years I have met so many great teachers. I did end up at the Rocklin campus finishing the last of my transfer units. I was so excited to graduate at the age of 62 in May of 2016.
Thank you so much Sierra College and the staff that helped me through those years of doubt and lack of confidence! I shall always be forever grateful for all that you have done for me.
Diane at the NCC Commencement in May, 2016 – PHOTO SUBMITTED BY DIANE WITTMAN-PUNTERI
I started college when I was 25 years old at the ‘old’ Sierra College campus in Auburn, California.
I graduated three years late from the ‘new’ campus in Rocklin in 1963, when it was lovingly called ‘Sahara College’ because of the lack of landscaping and paved parking. The parking lots became quagmires in the winter. The administration offices were located in the Winstead Building, which was then the library, and the book store was housed in the Campus Center.
Leland from the yearbook in 1963 on the left, and Leland in 2016 on the right.
I remember, as a student, being called out of Dr. Berutti’s class to help move his cattle off the campus and back across Sierra College Blvd to a field he rented for pasturing his animals. His cattle would often, somehow, manage to escape several times a month to graze on the new lawns of the campus.
When the Weaver Building was being constructed, I remember some students roping themselves to the oak trees to prevent the building site from being developed. It was a short-lived protest.
I started teaching full time at Sierra College in 1971, and my last experience was teaching part-time as an emeritus faculty at the Nevada County Campus. For over 48 years, Sierra was a large part of my life, and continues to be so today.
Among my ‘star’ students who returned to Sierra in other capacities were:
Lew Fellows had an insatiable passion for skiing. It probably helped that he was really, really good. In fact, he was Olympic good.
Fellows earned the right to be an alternate for the US Olympic ski team. If somebody got hurt, Fellows was the next man up. But Fellows made a commitment to himself if he didn’t get the opportunity to ski at the Olympics, he would go back to school. Fellows, a Truckee native, ended up at Sierra College after the Olympics. But his passion for skiing never waned, and he made sure to join the five-member Sierra College ski club, led by instructor Paul Chesney.
I didn’t do it alone. We won as a Sierra College family.
Lew Fellows, former dean of athletics
Lew Fellows and the ski team in 1955 – SIERRA COLLEGE ARCHIVE
Fast forward a few years. With a master’s degree in hand, Fellows was teaching high school students before an old friend tracked him down – Paul Chesney, Fellows’ former ski instructor, wanted him to come back to Sierra College to coach skiing. Fellows accepted and an Olympic tradition in Sierra athletics was born.
Fellows led the Sierra College Ski Team to a top two national ranking, and had Sports Illustrated declaring the Sierra College Ski Team as the top college team in the nation, competing against teams from Stanford, Berkeley, Nevada and Boston College. Fellows built a legacy of championships for the ski team, propelling him to become the Dean of Athletics for Sierra College, and overseeing various championship teams in baseball, football, basketball, softball, and swimming.
Asked about his success at Sierra College, Fellows replies, “I didn’t do it alone. We won as a Sierra College family.”
Charles Dailey holding a whale bone – SIERRA COLLEGE ARCHIVE
In the Spring of 1985 a student dropped off a newspaper clipping on zoology instructor Charles Dailey’s desk in Sewell Hall. It was about a fisherman’s find of a dead gray whale bobbing up and down under a pier at Benicia, just upstream of the Carquinez Straits Bridge. It had probably come into the bay to feed on shrimp. Dailey called the National Marine Fisheries Office in San Diego, which manages rare and endangered marine mammals. They had received numerous requests for various parts of the whale. Dailey asked if anyone had been crazy enough to request the entire whale. No one had…, yet! So Dailey did. They hadn’t decided what the fate would be but took his phone promised to call back with a decision. The next week a call came asking if he still wanted the entire whale body. He did. They had decided that if someone from their office came up and took possession of the whale and distributed parts that person would also be responsible for the disposal of all the rest of the whale. Soon the authorizing paperwork arrived.
In the meantime, Dailey had bought some butcher knives, a machete, borrowed his dad’s chainsaw and a real whale flensing knife from the California Academy of Sciences.
The Marine Fisheries staff arranged with the Mare Island Naval Ship Yard to have an amphibious land craft tow “Bob” to the Napa County landfill. Dailey thought about renaming it “Skip.” At the dump, the tow rope got caught in the propellor shaft. One of the sailors had to jump in and untangle the rope. The rope was hooked to the dump’s dozer and it was dragged up onto the beach and renamed “Sandy.”
By now the whale had been dead going on two weeks. In the meantime, the baleen plates on the roof of the mouth had loosened and fallen to the bottom of the bay. Academy staff had warned about opening a long dead whale. One being towed on a trail through town in Japan explored from internal gasses. Someone who cut open the abdominal cavity of another one was covered in stinky whale guts and juices. Dailey took a rifle and reduced internal pressure before they opened it. The college’s small flatbed truck had been borrowed to bring the front flippers home on day one—Friday.
The next day the truck was used as a photography platform for the Special Olympics at the college athletic fields. The odor of the dead whale emanating from the wood deck boards all day long was memorable for the unfortunate photographer and bystanders. The next day Jim Wilson brought down a van full of Sierra biology students to help peel off the still two-to-six inch thick blubber and render the whale into chunks of skeleton. It hadn’t starved to death. The cause of death was not apparent. Dailey bought his dad’s dump truck on Saturday to hold the pieces of the skeleton and haul it back to the college. Memorable odor! Motorists passed holding their noses. On the way back, the truck scale operator at Vallejo just waived the dump truck on without asking for it to be stopped and weighed.
At the college there wasn’t any convenient place to store a long dead stinky whale. It went home to Charles’ place and sat in the truck for a few days. It’s new name was “Buzz” for the horde of flies swarming around. Dad needed the dump truck so “Phil” for unloaded into a hole dug with a backhoe. Three days later the downstream neighbors called asking about a horrible stench with nothing to explain it on their side of the creek. Soon Phil got covered with dirt and renamed “Barry.” A few weeks later Barry was renamed “Doug” and moved to near the sprinklers in the pasture to wash off the dirt, oils, etc. That helped, but six 50-gallon barrels worked better to leach out the light oils. The heavy oils and grease didn’t respond so the barrels were emptied, raised up on bricks, refilled, and fire built under each barrel. This did a much better job of extracting oils and grease from “Stu.” The last step was to take it to the automotive department and steam clean it. That really got the grease heated up and coming out, right down the cold drain pipe where it cooled and congealed and plugged up the drain pipe. OOPS! Chevron Oil Company donated $1,000 for supplies for final skeleton preparation and mounting. To prevent future odor problems, the bones were dipped in a solution of liquid plastic (polyvinyl chloride.)
Soon Dailey got college permission to drill holes in the concrete floor of the planetarium level to install cast bolts and cables to suspend the 1,200 pound whale skeleton. Installation was finished about 15 minutes before the opening of the college’s 50th Anniversary open house in 1986, 11 months total time. One of the next visitors to museum looked up and asked, “Where did you get the dinosaur?”
One of the more notable characteristics of the whale is his broken 9th right rib that never healed. It probably contributed to the bony deposits that fused two thoracic vertebrae and generated massive bony deposits on five of the lumbar vertebrae, the power area of the torso. They impinged on the nerve cord to the point that it probably either experienced excruciating pain when swimming or was paralyzed and drowned. The unusual bone growths look somewhat like rheumatoid arthritis, but are probably a result of the high calcium diet. It was a 38-foot-long, sexually mature male whale, but most of the vertebrae have unfused growth plates. If it had lived longer, it might have grown another foot or two before the growth plates fused. The pelvic bones do not attach to the spine. These are vestiges of their inheritance from ancient terrestrial ancestors. The posterior caudal vertebrae taper down to a tiny terminal version. The skeleton seems to be missing the tail flukes, but they were only fibrous cartilage, somewhat like huge versions of your ear flaps or nasal cartilage.
A few years later, a science center in the south bay area salvaged both sets of whale baleen (fingernail-like) fringed plates from a slightly smaller grey whale. They donated the right side to us, and we had it freeze dried. It is now installed so visitors can see how grey whales and scoop up mouths full of ocean bottom mud. They then inflate their tongues with blood to squirt the water and mud out between the plates, retaining the shrimp, crab, shellfish, etc. So now hanging for display we have Sierra College’s Gray Whale, “Art.”
Ted Kitada (second from the left) and the maintenance crew, 1965 – SIERRA COLLEGE ARCHIVE
My time was very precious in landscaping including getting things organized in the morning. I had this one student who was hired to assist me and he did that for a good year. His name was David Mayes, a retired CHP man. He would help me by going to the post office and taking trash to the dump. There was no trash service at the time so someone had to go to the quarry to dump the trash.
One day David Mayes had gone to the dump. At the dump they had these granite railroad ties laid across the edge of the quarry. The ties were there so people would not accidentally roll back into the quarry. Sometimes when a dump truck would come, the dump truck bed would not reach over to the edge far enough to dump it clean. Unfortunately that day, the ties were all blocked by trash. Since the other spots were full of trash and he couldn’t back up, he selected the end that didn’t have a block.
Apparently he backed up and had it hoisted up. The truck started rolling back and it was just too dangerous for him to jump back in and pull the brakes. The dump truck being heavy, it just got swallowed up in the trash.
When he saw me, the comment he made was, “It’s gone! It’s gone!” I said, “What’s gone?” He said, “The truck.”
I said, “You’re still here. Don’t worry about that.”
Turns out the loss of the truck was a good thing. They contracted to get the trash taken to the dump after that.
County garbage dump, 1967 yearbook – SIERRA COLLEGE ARCHIVE
