Have a wonderful winter break everyone
... and go Ags!

As you prepare for winter break, take a moment to hear a rich variety of season’s greetings offered up by UC Davis staff members throughout the Finance, Operations and Administration division.

We knew our FOA colleagues were multi-talented, with a wide variety of backgrounds and expertise. After all, our teams keep the lights on, the paychecks flowing and the campus growing — in so many ways.

But even we didn’t know how many languages our team members speak!

Here are the speakers in this year’s FOA holiday video:

• Ileana Y Acevedo from Finance, speaking in Spanish
• Michelle Ku from Design and Construction Management, speaking in Korean
• Philip Barruel from Safety Services, speaking in Tagalog
• Heloisa Kinder from Admin IT, speaking in  Portuguese
• Irina Skiba from FOA Business Partners, speaking in Russian
• Vice Chancellor Clare Shinnerl from FOA, speaking in German
• Lina Planutyte from Safety Services, speaking in Lithuanian
• Priya Venkatesan from Office of Business Transformation, speaking in Tamil
• Romeeta Singh Shankar from Admin IT, speaking in Fiji-Hindi
• Matt Matuszak from Human Resources, speaking in French
• Sarah Quezada from Safety Services, speaking in Spanish
• Leo Almeida from FOA Business Partners, speaking in Tagalog

It turns out that more than 100 languages are spoken at UC Davis, according to student application data. In 2019, the top 20 languages spoken by our campus community were: English, Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Hindi/Urdu, Korean, Punjabi, Tagalog, Persian (Farsi), Arabic, Japanese, Russian, French, Tamil, Indonesian, Hmong, Gujarati, Telugu, Thai and Bengali.