Events

Academia often demands more from faculty of color, especially women. Service duties like mentoring, advising, and supporting marginalized students and filling diversity quotas on committees leaves less time to focus on aspects of the job that are most heavily weighted in our evaluations. This unsustainable pace often compromises our productivity, creativity, efficacy, and ability to engage in self-care. This presentation, best suited for individuals with little or no familiarity with artificial intelligence (AI), offers strategies for reclaiming our time by harnessing the power of AI. Together we will explore practical uses for leveraging AI to optimize our research and teaching.  

Writing a strong cover letter may not be as hard as you think. This career lab will address the basic steps to understanding and deciding what to include, and how to organize this important part of most job applications. Primarily addresses non-faculty job searches, but the tips included will help job seekers in any field. (Feel free to bring your lunch, there will be light snacks) QB3-Berkeley programs support the career exploration and job search interests of bioscience doctoral students and postdocs; however PhDs from other disciplines are welcome. Register  

The UC Berkeley Digital Humanities Working Group is a research community founded to facilitate interdisciplinary conversations in the digital humanities and cultural analytics. Our gatherings are participant-driven and provide a place for sharing research ideas (including brainstorming new ideas and receiving feedback from others), learning about the intersection of computational methods and humanistic inquiry, and connecting with others working in this space at Berkeley. We welcome grad students, faculty, and staff from all disciplinary backgrounds regardless of whether you are a beginner or an expert in empirical and data-driven methods. Working group meetings may include participants sharing work on current or future research, open discussions about theoretical, methodological or other challenges (e.g., data collection), invited speakers, and social mixers. Research at any stage of development (including nascent) is welcome for discussion.

2025 Banking and Finance Week will be held in-person* on February 4, 5, and 6, and provides you with opportunities to meet with firms throughout the week at multiple targeted events, to explore full-time jobs and internships in Investment Banking, Private Equity, Asset Management, and Finance.  

This workshop provides a beginner-friendly introduction to coding with GitHub Copilot, a popular AI coding assistant. We will start from the basics so you can take advantage of AI assistants to improve your coding and avoid common pitfalls. First, we’ll cover how to install and set-up Visual Studio Code, a free code editor through which we will use GitHub Copilot. Then, we will go through the different features of GitHub Copilot and how to use them to help us code in R. Prerequisites: D-Lab’s R Fundamentals or equivalent knowledge; previous experience with base R is assumed.

Navigating non-academic career options can feel overwhelming, but you don’t have to do it alone. This workshop will help you reflect on your own career goals, values, and skills, and learn about non-academic careers that value the expertise you have developed as a social science or humanities graduate student. Virtual workshop hosted by GradPro. Learn more and sign-up for the workshop in the registration form.

While graduate students do not need to become experts in how students learn, a basic understanding of the research on learning can enable GSIs to make informed teaching decisions. Drawing on research findings from neuroscience, anthropology, and cognitive and social psychology, this workshop will enable GSIs to consider ways to apply research-based principles to the learning environments they create for their students. Register

What do UC Berkeley students think about generative AI, and how are they using it? Join us for a moderated student panel that explores how current undergrad and graduate Berkeley students and their peers are using AI, their questions and concerns about the technology, their thoughts on course policies and academic integrity, how they think AI tools should (or shouldn't) be used in the classroom, what they’d like to know about these tools, and more. This session will run for 45 minutes, with an additional 15 minutes reserved for questions. Register

Navigating non-academic career options can feel overwhelming, but you don’t have to do it alone. This workshop will help you reflect on your own career goals, values, and skills, and learn about non-academic careers that value the expertise you have developed as a STEM student. Virtual workshop hosted by GradPro. Learn more and sign-up for the workshop in the registration form.

Qualtrics is a powerful online tool available to Berkeley community members that can be used for a range of data collection activities. Primarily, Qualtrics is designed to make web surveys easy to write, test, and implement, but the software can be used for data entry, training, quality control, evaluation, market research, pre/post-event feedback, and other uses with some creativity. This overview will introduce a simple workflow using the system with an orientation to the main interfaces for web survey design, sample management, corresponding with sample members, and exporting data at the end of the field period. Examples from completed surveys in public health, economics, program evaluation, and other disciplines will be incorporated in the overview. This workshop will introduce students to the basics of designing a survey instrument using the Qualtrics platform, such as randomization and survey flow. We will also cover more advanced topics like implementing embedded data and using javascript, as well as tips and tricks on how to use your design to maximize the number of quality responses you get.

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.

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

This three-hour workshop will cover charts in more detail, review pivot tables, and the widely-used VLOOKUP function. We recommend first taking the introductory workshop Excel Data Analysis: Introduction.  

Do you need to have a breakthrough in your writing and research productivity? Do you promise yourself every term that you're going to be highly productive, but end up falling short year after year? Do you want to learn why our Faculty Success Program consistently improves over 90% of participants' productivity every session? If so, join us for one of our most popular webinars where you will learn: How to avoid the biggest mistakes academic writers make during the academic term How to maximize your research and writing productivity How to combat professional isolation and create a supportive writing community

This event is our 2025 Banking and Finance Week (held VIRTUAL* on zoom), on February 11, 12, and 13, and provides you with opportunities to meet with firms throughout the week at multiple targeted events, to explore full-time jobs and internships in Investment Banking, Private Equity, Asset Management, and Finance.

In this workshop, we provide a basic introduction to how to interact with your computer via terminal. We are going to focus on Bash (Bourne-Again Shell) or Zsh (Z Shell), which are one of the most commonly used Unix/Linux shells. Prerequisites: None.

Graduate students who receive stipends, salaries, or are in a niche tax situation can attend this workshop for tax guidance. This workshop walks you through calculating the taxable portion of your academic income and minimizing your tax liability using your higher education expenses. Whether you received a Form W-2, a Form 1098-T, some other unusual document, or no tax forms at all, this workshop is for you. Register Here

Focusing on a case study, we will discuss how assignments can be crafted with an eye for students’ diverse skills and needs. Our case study will exemplify scaffolding assessments with practice, feedback, and revision to allow students ample opportunities to show what they know. What are Spark Talks? Spark Talks are short 20-minute sessions that aim to spark interest in new or different approaches to teaching and learning, as well as foster connections and conversations around instruction at UC Berkeley. Spark Talks are interactive presentations that digest recent research articles into practical terms for instructors. Instructors are also invited to stay after the session to connect with colleagues and CTL staff. Spark Talks are an opportunity to welcome IN our instructor colleagues and start cross-campus dialogue on teaching. As part of the Spark Talk series, this session aims to: INtroduce one specific evidence-based teaching practice from the recent literature on teaching and learning INform instructors about the considerations for applying this particular practice (what, why, and how) INvestigate a few examples of how this technique could be implemented in a course INspire instructors to explore using this new technique in their course Instructors are encouraged to follow up with CTL in 1-on-1 consultation to continue to explore what this particular teaching practice might look like in their own course contexts. This session will run for 20 minutes, with an additional 10 minutes reserved for questions and networking.

Grab your strategic plan and learn the secret to making it work day-to-day and week-to-week! How to Align Your Time with Your Priorities is a step-by-step guide to holding a weekly planning meeting (aka The Weekly Meeting). In this webinar you'll learn: What works…and what DOESN'T work when it comes to weekly planning Why weekly planning is the bridge between your strategic plan and getting control of your workday The 30-minute technique that will help you make sure that the most important things get done each day And much more... This is a HANDS-ON webinar where you'll not only learn the technique but actually do it!

This workshop will provide an introduction to graphics in R with ggplot2. Participants will learn how to construct, customize, and export a variety of plot types in order to visualize relationships in data. We will also explore the basic grammar of graphics, including the aesthetics and geometry layers, adding statistics, transforming scales, and coloring or panelling by groups. You will learn how to make histograms, boxplots, scatterplots, lineplots, and heatmaps as well as how to make compound figures. Prerequisites: D-Lab’s R Fundamentals(link is external) or equivalent knowledge; previous experience with base R is assumed.

Join an interactive session to exchange ideas and collaborate with GradPro staff and your fellow graduate students. Together, you’ll explore strategies for fostering strong, productive relationships with academic mentors and advisors. Snacks and drinks will be provided. Learn more and sign-up for the group chat in the registration form.

Join Historian and political commentator Heather Cox Richardson joins UC Berkeley professor of law and history Dylan Penningroth for a conversation on Forging a New Political System, 2024 and Beyond. In a timely conversation about the reshaping of the United States’ two major political parties. A professor of 19th century American history at Boston College, Richardson provides an incisive perspective on current politics to the more than three million readers of her nightly newsletter, Letters from an American. To learn more visit the Berkeley Graduate Lectures Website.