Upcoming Events

The GSI Center’s Workshops on Teaching for GSIs cover a wide variety of topics related to university teaching and the GSI experience. The purpose of the series is to offer GSIs, and other graduate students interested in teaching, opportunities for hands-on learning and practical discussion about pedagogy. To assist us in planning, pre-registration is required.

Join us for an exciting conversation with Nicolás P. Villarreal, a talented film and animation director from La Plata, Argentina. Currently serving as the Executive Art Director of the Visual Development and Traditional Animation Department at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, where he teaches film and animation design, Nicolás brings a wealth of expertise and fresh perspectives to the table. Get ready for an inspiring discussion that combines his artistic mastery with his passion for teaching, and discover how the power of the creative process can enhance pedagogy across all disciplines, igniting curiosity, fostering innovation, and transforming the learning experience. Register here.

Improve your teaching and prepare for the academic job search. Come find out what is typically addressed in a teaching philosophy statement and participate in activities that will help you get started. Register here or view all fall GSI Center’s Workshops on Teaching for GSIs here.

Join the Gradescope team as they show Gradescope's new features in action. Some of these features include: Annotate with emoji Export submissions for online assignments Grade fully anonymously  and many more! This session will be held via Zoom. ➡️ Register for this event here!⬅️ Unable to join us for this workshop? Check the RTL events calendar for future offerings of this workshop. Engage with our asynchronous offerings on this topic: About Gradescope, join the Gradescope@Berkeley listserv for updates about the service, and to connect with other users on campus, receive customized assistance by emailing gradescope@berkeley.edu, or by scheduling a consultation

Gradescope is a suite of tools designed to accommodate a common grading workflow. Students or instructors scan and upload their homework or exams. Instructors and GSIs create a living rubric that allows for speedy grading of large courses. The software can reveal valuable statistics about students work, and provide a path for students to request re-grades of questions. This one-hour workshop will focus on how you can use Gradescope to deliver and grade your assignments that are paper-based, fully online, and a combination of the two. In this workshop, you will learn how to: Set up assignments where students can submit freeform work (no printers or templates needed) Grade your existing exams and homework on Gradescope Make rubric changes as you grade - changes apply to previously graded work to maintain consistency Write each comment only once - apply previously used comments with a click Use ‘assignment analytics’ to gain insight into student learning This session will be held via Zoom. ➡️ Register for this event here!⬅️ Unable to join us for this workshop? Check the RTL events calendar for future offerings of this workshop. Engage with our asynchronous offerings on this topic: About Gradescope, join the Gradescope@Berkeley listserv for updates about the service, and to connect with other users on campus, receive customized assistance by emailing gradescope@berkeley.edu, or by scheduling a consultation

This required education session is designed to help new grad students learn strategies for preventing sexual violence and sexual harassment (SVSH), as well as understand their rights, resources, and options if impacted by SVSH. Register here.

Do you: Struggle to share your writing at the early stages because it’s not perfect? Find yourself devastated by criticism of your work? Beat yourself up every time the tiniest thing goes wrong? Find it difficult to celebrate other people’s success because it reminds you of your own shortcomings? If any of these things sound familiar, CONGRATULATIONS! You’re a perfectly normal perfectionist! The only problem is that the nature of the Academy is likely to exacerbate your perfectionist tendencies, as opposed to minimizing them. In this webinar, perfectionists will unite to get clear about: The causes and consequences of excessive perfectionism. The features of academic life that intensify perfectionism Strategies to identify when your perfectionism is at work, assess whether it is useful or debilitating, and adjust your standards and behavior accordingly The secret to finding real satisfaction in every step of the writing process Be sure to activate your institutional membership here and register for this event here.

This required education session is designed to help new grad students learn strategies for preventing sexual violence and sexual harassment (SVSH), as well as understand their rights, resources, and options if impacted by SVSH. Register here.

The NSF GRFP provides three years of funding to outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and social science disciplines who are at or near the beginning of a degree earning program. The Graduate Division is hosting an NSF GRFP Application Workshop via Zoom from 10:45am-12:30pm. on Friday, September 15th, 2023. Attendees will have an opportunity to hear from a panel composed of successful applicants and a previous faculty reviewer, as well as ask questions. Date: Friday, September 15th, 2023 Time: 10:45am to 12:30pm. RSVP, Registrants will receive an email with the Zoom link closer to the workshop Location: Virtual via Zoom

Join us for an exciting session that goes "Beyond the Basics" of iClicker Cloud—an innovative classroom engagement solution designed to enhance student attendance, preparedness, and mastery of course material. In this session, participants will have the opportunity to: Explore Instructor Site Settings Beyond Polling and Gradebook: Discover the possibilities that iClicker Cloud offers beyond its fundamental functions. Uncover advanced features that foster interactive learning experiences. Assignments: Learn how to leverage iClicker Cloud's assignment capabilities to drive student engagement and comprehension. Effective Quizzing Demonstrations: Experience the versatility of quizzing with iClicker Cloud through pre-created and on-the-fly quizzing options. Groups: Explore how group dynamics can foster collaborative learning and enrich classroom interactions. Navigate Support Options: Gain insight into the support avenues available for iClicker Cloud. This session will be held via Zoom. Please register to get the Zoom link. ➡️ Register for this event here!⬅️

Join Drs. Nelson O. O. Zounlomè and Lei Wang from Liberate The Block in an engaging and transformative webinar designed to equip graduate students with essential strategies and tools for a successful academic career right from Day 1. In this dynamic session, we will delve into key topics that are crucial for your scholarly journey. Here's what you can expect to learn: Setting and Prioritizing Academic Career Goals: Discover effective techniques to define and prioritize your academic career goals, setting a strong foundation for your future success. Maintaining Holistic Well-Being While in School: Learn valuable strategies to balance your personal well-being alongside your academic pursuits, ensuring a healthy and fulfilling graduate school experience. Creating an Individualized Plan for Success: Uncover the secrets to developing a personalized plan that aligns with your aspirations, leveraging your unique strengths and interests. By the end of this webinar, you will walk away with a wealth of practical steps, valuable knowledge, and essential resources that will empower you to not only survive but thrive in the next phase of your scholarly journey

This session is for graduate students, PhDs and postdocs who are applying for faculty positions. PLEASE NOTE If you are an UNDERGRADUATE please DO NOT register for this event. For information on graduate school, see the link below https://career.berkeley.edu/get-into-grad-school/ 

Ally is an integrated accessibility tool in bCourses that provides: Alternative formats of instructor-uploaded digital course content, that optimizes compatibility with mobile devices, screen readers, and other assistive technologies. Interactive guidance on how instructors can make course content more accessible Benefits for Students: Using Ally, students can convert files and course content into alternative formats such as BeeLine Reader, EPUB, Electronic Braille, Immersive Reader, PDF, HTML, MP3 (audio), and foreign language translations. Students can generate file types that work best for them without instructor assistance. In addition to helping students with disabilities, these alternative formats can help English language learners and students with diverse learning preferences (mobile, audio, larger font sizes, etc.). Benefits for Instructors: The Ally tool assigns visual indicators next to course materials, so instructors can see accessibility scores (students do not see these indicators).  Guidance is also provided on how to create more accessible course content. By the end of the workshop, participants will be able to: Download alternative formats provided by Ally Interact with Ally scores and review suggested fixes Enable the Ally Course Accessibility Report Use the WYSIWYG Instructor Feedback tool Identify where to receive assistance to improve scores Attend this workshop to learn how to improve the accessibility of your bCourses content so students can better access and convert bCourses Pages and download files into multiple formats and translated versions.  During the workshop, exciting new features will be demonstrated, along with strategies to increase your accessibility scores within bCourses. ➡️ Register for this event here!⬅️

If you're looking to self-publish work of any length and want an easy-to-use tool that offers a high degree of customization, allows flexibility with publishing formats (EPUB, PDF), and provides web-hosting options, Pressbooks may be great for you. Pressbooks is often the tool of choice for academics creating digital books, open textbooks, and open educational resources, since you can license your materials for reuse however you desire. Learn why and how to use Pressbooks for publishing your original books or course materials. You'll leave the workshop with a project already under way. Register here.

Pandas is a Python package that provides fast, flexible, and expressive data structures designed to make working with 'relational' or 'labeled' data both easy and intuitive. It enables doing practical, real world data analysis in Python. In this workshop, we'll work with example data and go through the various steps you might need to prepare data for analysis. We will cover: Pandas data structures Loading data Subsetting and filtering Calculating summary statistics Dealing with missing values Merging data sets Creating new variables Basic plotting Exporting data Prerequisites: D-Lab’s Python Fundamentals introductory series or equivalent knowledge. GitHub Repository: https://github.com/dlab-berkeley/Python-Data-Wrangling Software Requirements:Installation Instructions for Python Anaconda Register: Log in via CalNet

This systemwide AB 540 FAQ (frequently asked questions) aims to increase alignment in the implementation of AB 540 and streamline processing between the CCCs, CSUs, and UCs, as well as at individual campuses. Register for this in person event here.

Gradescope is a suite of tools designed to accommodate a common grading workflow. Students or instructors scan and upload their homework or exams. Instructors and GSIs create a living rubric that allows for speedy grading of large courses. The software can reveal valuable statistics about students work, and provide a path for students to request re-grades of questions. This one-hour workshop will focus on how you can use Gradescope to deliver and grade your assignments that are paper-based, fully online, and a combination of the two. In this workshop, you will learn how to: Set up assignments where students can submit freeform work (no printers or templates needed) Grade your existing exams and homework on Gradescope Make rubric changes as you grade - changes apply to previously graded work to maintain consistency Write each comment only once - apply previously used comments with a click Use ‘assignment analytics’ to gain insight into student learning This session will be held via Zoom. ➡️ Register for this event here!⬅️

This required education session is designed to help new grad students learn strategies for preventing sexual violence and sexual harassment (SVSH), as well as understand their rights, resources, and options if impacted by SVSH. Register here.

It is said that 80% of data analysis is spent on the process of cleaning and preparing the data for exploration, visualization, and analysis. This R workshop will introduce the dplyr and tidyr packages to make data wrangling and manipulation easier. Participants will learn how to use these packages to subset and reshape data sets, do calculations across groups of data, clean data, and other useful tasks. Prerequisites: D-Lab’s R Fundamentals or equivalent knowledge; previous experience with base R is assumed. Workshop Materials: https://github.com/dlab-berkeley/R-wrang Software Requirements:Installation Instructions for R and RStudio

This two-part workshop series will prepare participants to move forward with research that uses text analysis, with a special focus on humanities and social science applications. Part 1: Preprocessing Text.  How do we standardize and clean text documents? Text data is noisy, and we often need to develop a pipeline in order to standardize the data, to better facilitate computational modeling. In the first part of this workshop, we walk through possible steps in this pipeline using tools from basic Python, NLTK, and spaCy in order to preprocess and tokenize our data. Part 2: Bag-of-words Representations How do we convert text into a representation that we can operate on computationally? This requires developing a numerical representation of the text. In this part of the workshop, we study one of the foundational numerical representation of text data: the bag-of-words model. This model relies heavily on word frequencies in order to characterize text corpora. We build bag-of-words models, and their variations (e.g., TF-IDF), and use these representations to perform classification on text. To continue with Text Analysis sign up for Topic Modeling or Word Embeddings.  Part 3: Topic Modeling. How do we identify topics within a corpus of documents? In this part, we study unsupervised learning of text data. Specifically, we use topic models such as Latent Dirichlet Allocation and Non-negative Matrix Factorization to construct “topics” in text from the statistical regularities in the data. Part 4: Word Embeddings How can we use neural networks to create meaningful representations of words? The bag-of-words is limited in its ability to characterize text, because it does not utilize word context. In this part, we study word embeddings, which were among the first attempts to use neural networks to develop numerical representations of text that incorporate context. We learn how to use the package gensim to construct and explore word embeddings of text. The first two parts are taught as a joint series. Parts 3 and 4 can be attended "a la carte"; however, prior knowledge of Parts 1 and 2 is assumed. Prerequisites: D-Lab’s Python Fundamentals introductory series or equivalent knowledge. Workshop Materials: https://github.com/dlab-berkeley/Python-Text-Analysis Software Requirements:Installation Instructions for Python Anaconda

This workshop fulfills a requirement for the Certificate of Teaching & Learning in Higher Education. In order to receive credit for the Certificate of Teaching and Learning:  Arrive punctually and attend the entire meeting. Complete the attendance form at the end of the session (you can review your records under Event History or Path). For attendance tracking ease, we ask that you use your given name as your display name in Zoom. Register here.

Looking for a job or internship in the private, government or nonprofit sector, but not sure how to find opportunities or best present yourself as a grad student/PhD/Postdoc? Prep for the Master/PhD Career Fair October 4th, oriented towards employers primarily interested in recruiting candidates with advanced degrees. Learn how to approach potential employers, transform your CV into a resume, and other means of interacting effectively with recruiters from the business, government, and nonprofit sectors. In addition, hundreds of companies will use On-Campus Recruiting (OCR) to search for new talent, and an increasing number are interested in graduate students and PhDs. This service is free for all graduate students and postdocs, and the Fall recruiting season begins toward the end of September. Learn more about the process, and how to use the system to your best advantage.

This workshop will provide you with practical guidance for navigating copyright questions and other legal considerations for your dissertation or thesis. Whether you’re just starting to write or you’re getting ready to file, you can use our tips and workflow to figure out what you can use, what rights you have as an author, and what it means to share your dissertation online. Register here.    

This two-part workshop series will prepare participants to move forward with research that uses text analysis, with a special focus on humanities and social science applications. Part 1: Preprocessing Text.  How do we standardize and clean text documents? Text data is noisy, and we often need to develop a pipeline in order to standardize the data, to better facilitate computational modeling. In the first part of this workshop, we walk through possible steps in this pipeline using tools from basic Python, NLTK, and spaCy in order to preprocess and tokenize our data. Part 2: Bag-of-words Representations How do we convert text into a representation that we can operate on computationally? This requires developing a numerical representation of the text. In this part of the workshop, we study one of the foundational numerical representation of text data: the bag-of-words model. This model relies heavily on word frequencies in order to characterize text corpora. We build bag-of-words models, and their variations (e.g., TF-IDF), and use these representations to perform classification on text. To continue with Text Analysis sign up for Topic Modeling or Word Embeddings.  Part 3: Topic Modeling. How do we identify topics within a corpus of documents? In this part, we study unsupervised learning of text data. Specifically, we use topic models such as Latent Dirichlet Allocation and Non-negative Matrix Factorization to construct “topics” in text from the statistical regularities in the data. Part 4: Word Embeddings How can we use neural networks to create meaningful representations of words? The bag-of-words is limited in its ability to characterize text, because it does not utilize word context. In this part, we study word embeddings, which were among the first attempts to use neural networks to develop numerical representations of text that incorporate context. We learn how to use the package gensim to construct and explore word embeddings of text. The first two parts are taught as a joint series. Parts 3 and 4 can be attended "a la carte"; however, prior knowledge of Parts 1 and 2 is assumed. Prerequisites: D-Lab’s Python Fundamentals introductory series or equivalent knowledge. Workshop Materials: https://github.com/dlab-berkeley/Python-Text-Analysis Software Requirements:Installation Instructions for Python Anaconda

Career Connections are co-sponsored by the Cal Alumni Association, these events are your opportunity to meet with alumni and professionals representing a variety of roles within a career field. Gain insider knowledge about hiring practices and create meaningful connections that could lead to a future internship or job! Come explore the variety of career and internship possibilities found in the world of helping professions with first generation (first in family to college) alumni working in various roles. Helping professions are occupations that provide health and education services to individuals and groups, including the fields of psychology, psychiatry, counseling, medicine, nursing, social work, physical and occupational therapy, teaching, and education. Students of all majors are welcome! Light refreshments will be provided. Featured speakers will be posted closer to the event.