Notable alumni with graduate degrees, all honored by the California Alumni Association In the Fall 2005 issue (pp. 22-23), we presented a group of Berkeley alumni who shared at least two characteristics: 1) they had earned one or more graduate degrees at this campus, and 2) they each had won a Nobel Prize.
UC Berkeley is at or near the top in recent rankings of universities in the U.S. and the world The academic reputation of this campus continues to gleam among its counterparts in this country and around the globe, according to recent independent assessments.
More honors for Chemistry’s high-climbing Arlene Blum Biochemist and mountaineer Arlene Blum Ph.D. ’71, who won the $100,000 Purpose Prize late last year for mobilizing society to protect its members by reducing toxic chemicals, has received still more honors in 2009, and the year isn’t even half over.
Two from Grad Division are honored for ‘going beyond’ In mid-April, atop Barrows Hall, Chancellor Robert Birgeneau honored three teams and 22 individuals with the Chancellor’s Outstanding Staff Award, nicknamed COSA.
The NAS picks six from Berkeley in its crop of new members The National Academy of Sciences (NAS), one of America’s most prestigious societies of scholars engaged in science and engineering research, at the end of April announced its election of 72 members, six of whom are Berkeley researchers.
Heaping honors on the highly helpful The Graduate Division, which oversees graduate education at Berkeley, and the Graduate Assembly, the grad students’ government, are making up for lost time. For decades, the campus did little to reward the vital role many faculty members play as mentors to their students. Countering that non-trend, the two groups have joined forces for the third year in a row, presenting their own faculty honors in a combined ceremony.
What makes the wheel go around When I was a graduate student, I was a teaching assistant (more than once) for a very inspiring mentor, a man named Manos Vakalo. His teams of teaching assistants had remarkable autonomy. He never questioned a grade we gave, and he always treated us as respected equals. In retrospect, we could be dumb at times; I remember bringing beer to a critique for our undergraduates, and Manos simply raising an eyebrow in reprimand. That, however, was enough. He had remarkable expressions, every one of which I think I could still imitate perfectly today, nearly 20 years later.
Pulling all-nighters, buying pizza, dressing up as Darwin… As a GSI for Finance (BA 103) and Managerial Accounting (BA 102B), William "Willy" Wong, MBA '05, would offer "numerous review sessions and have 12-hour-long office-hour visits," wrote one of the 37 student who nominated him for heroic status. Another singled out the "large packets of material [he prepared] to help us learn the subject matter, which must have taken him many hours each time" — packets that "if compiled fully, will rival the class textbooks," said another admirer. When one student was having trouble obtaining internships, Wong gave him advice, then offered to look over his résumé, as he did for several others. And his 24/7 help was nondiscriminating: roughly half of the 37 survey respondents admitted that they were not even enrolled in one of his sections.