GSIs (and their mentors) are central to Berkeley’s teaching mission
Dear Graduate Students, As the spring semester drew to a close, I enjoyed several opportunities to celebrate great teaching by graduate students. At the Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award ceremony on the first of May at International House, we acknowledged the excellent work of 276 GSIs, out of the more than three thousand GSIs who [...]
Out of thousands of dedicated GSIs, 276 are named especially outstanding
Their departments nominate them, a GSI-related faculty committee selects them, and colleagues, family, and friends come together to honor them in a commencement-like ceremony. What it all means is that they’re already pretty darn good teachers.
GSI honors for a dozen new ways of helping people learn
These 12 people, in some ways the crème de la crème of this year’s top graduate student instructors, have effectively, and often cleverly, identified, addressed, and documented a teaching problem they encountered and, for the benefit of all, told how they solved it. Read, for instance, how Sonja Schwartz reinvented the bean jar.
The key to totally surprising a mentor: no leaks
So far, nobody’s let the cat out of the bag, so the surprise has been total in every case. Despite Berkeley’s long tradition of protest and California’s reputation for spontaneity, faculty members here simply don’t expect to be interrupted by outsiders while they’re teaching a class. When it dawns on them that the invasion brings unexpected but happy news for them personally, decorum goes out the window.
Postdoc opportunity: UCLA Library eScience
With funding from the Council on Library Resources/Digital Library Federation, the UCLA Library has created a new postdoctoral fellow position in data curation. Geared for a recent Ph.D., the new position will be part of the UCLA Library’s eScience team, which is lead by the Associate University Librarian for Sciences and Associate University Librarian for [...]
Sociology’s Nazanin Shahrokni receives a Woodrow Wilson Women’s Studies Dissertation Fellowship
Nazanin Shahrokni, a doctoral candidate in sociology at Berkeley, has been awarded one of six national 2012 Woodrow Wilson Women’s Studies Dissertation Fellowships. Shahrokni’s dissertation is titled “Gender Segregated Spaces: Traversing the “Public” in the Islamic Republic of Iran.” Since its establishment in 1979, the Islamic Republic of Iran has made efforts to segregate urban [...]
Grad alum Ricardo Cortez, now at Tulane, wins the prestigious Blackwell-Tapia Prize
Tulane University math professor Ricardo Cortez, who is internationally regarded as a leading researcher in fluid dynamics and mathematical modeling, has been chosen as the 2012 recipient of the Blackwell-Tapia Prize, which will be presented in November. In 2010, Cortez received the Distinguished Undergraduate Institution Mentor Award from the Society for Advancement of Chicanos and [...]
M.F.A. Graduate Bridges Place and Art
The new Bay Bridge is still more than a year away from opening, but it’s already inspiring the art of Amanda Hughen, M.F.A. ’03. Hughen and her frequent collaborator, Jennifer Starkweather, created a series of abstract prints, paintings, and drawings that reflect the past and future of the Bay Bridge. Titled “Approach, Transition, Touchdown,” the [...]
Berkeley doctoral candidates Mont Allen, Robert Harkins, Bruno Reinhardt, and Bharat Venkat win prestigious Newcombe Fellowships
Out of a field of 550 applicants, 21 winners of the 2012 Newcombe Fellowship were just announced, and Berkeley graduate students won four, nearly a fifth of the total.
