Campus Partners

The Graduate Writing Center assists graduate students in the development of academic skills necessary to successfully complete their graduate programs and prepare for future faculty and professional positions. This unit offers workshops on topics such as academic writing, grant writing, dissertation writing, editing, and preparing articles for publication, in addition to writing groups and individual consultations on these topics for graduate students.

The GSI Teaching & Resource Center helps graduate students transition to teaching as GSIs at UC Berkeley and offers programs and services to assist graduate students in developing their teaching skills for future academic and non-academic careers. The GSI-TRC also works with faculty and departments to assist them in the mentoring and teaching preparation they offer graduate students.

The goal of Berkeley Connect is to combine the world-class intellectual facilities of the University with the nurturing inclusiveness of a small, liberal arts college. Undergraduates at Berkeley increasingly wish for a more intimate and supportive academic experience, one in which they can be part of an intellectual community comprising faculty, graduate students, their fellow undergraduates, and alumni/ae.

Berkeley Connect provides just such an experience by placing participants in small discussion groups assigned to a graduate mentor, who is responsible for group meetings and one-on-one advising. In addition, the program includes informal lectures by professors, visits to Berkeley resources, panel discussions of career opportunities and graduate school, and social events in which professors, graduate students, and undergraduates can talk informally about intellectual issues.

Founded in 2013, the Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS) is a central hub of research and education at UC Berkeley designed to facilitate and nurture data-intensive science. People are at the heart of BIDS. They are building a community centered on a cohort of talented data science fellows and senior fellows who are representative of the world-class researchers from across campus and are leading the data science revolution within their disciplines.

Their initiatives are designed to bring together broad constituents of the data science community, including domain experts from the life, social, and physical sciences and methodological experts from computer science, statistics, and applied mathematics. While many of these individuals rarely cross professional paths, BIDS actively seeks new and creative ways to engage and foster collaboration across these different research fields.

Berkeley Postdoctoral Entrepreneur Program (BPEP) aims to foster entrepreneurship in the UC Berkeley postdoctoral and graduate community. They provide tools, mentoring, and a platform for science-business communication to enable research innovations to move into the marketplace. They believe entrepreneurship is an integral part of UC Berkeley’s ethos, and aim to build a community of entrepreneurship among UC Berkeley’s postdocs and graduate students.

Beyond Academia is a yearly professional development conference created by UC Berkeley PhD students and postdocs to expose their peers to career options outside of academia. Their main objective is to educate students on the translatable skills they have acquired during their graduate work. They believe it is never too early for PhD students and postdocs to educate themselves about their career options. Their conferences bring career professionals and successfully transitioned PhDs to speak with graduate students and postdocs considering alternative career options. These conferences also include workshops and networking events for close interaction between students and panelists.

The Career Center has counselors specifically dedicated to helping graduate students.  Each year, over 2,500 Berkeley graduate students receive career planning guidance and employment-related assistance from the Career Center.

Graduate student services include:

• Individual, confidential counseling
• Workshops and presentations
• Career fairs and employer info sessions
• Email alerts
• Job listings
• On-campus recruiting

You can learn more from the Career Center website, visit in person 9 am to 5 pm, Monday through Friday at 2440 Bancroft Way, or call 510-642-1716.Career Center website

CDIPS is a graduate student run organization that provides resources to graduate students and postdocs in the physical and mathematical sciences about their options outside academia through a speaker series, the Data Science Workshop, and improved access to alumni. Founded in 2012, CDIPS aims to provide scientists with the information they need to make better informed career decisions.

Founded in 1961 the Center for the Study of Law and Society encourages and supports empirical research and theoretical analysis of the social consequence of law, including legal institutions and processes, the impact of law on individuals and groups, and social, political, and intellectual influences on law itself and legal activity. While located in the U. C. Berkeley School of Law the Center provides an environment where faculty and graduate students from many campus departments in the socials sciences and humanities, as well as visiting scholars from the US and oversees institutions regularly meet, present research papers, exchange ideas, and explore new concepts, perspective and research agendas. The Center’s associated faculty and visitors are drawn from many disciplines, such as political science, sociology, economics, psychology, law, philosophy, and history.

D-Lab helps Berkeley faculty, staff, and graduate students move forward with world-class research in data intensive social science. We think of data as an expansive category, one that is constantly changing as the research frontier moves. We offer a venue for methodological exchange from all corners of campus and across its bounds.

D-Lab provides cross-disciplinary resources for in-depth consulting and advising, access to staff support, and training and provisioning for software and other infrastructure needs. Networking with other Berkeley centers and facilities and with our departments and schools, we offer our services to researchers across the disciplines and underwrite the breadth of excellence of Berkeley’s graduate programs and faculty research. D-Lab builds networks through which Berkeley researchers can connect with users of social science data in the off-campus world.

The Digital Humanities at Berkeley initiative is a multi-year partnership between Research IT and the Dean of Arts and Humanities.  With generous support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, the initiative is focused on building capacity for DH research and teaching and connecting a variety of campus institutions.  These programs will include grants for collaborative research and DH pedagogy, fellowships, and internships.

Research IT offers consulting at all stages of project development, including tool selection, grant development, recruiting research assistants, technical assessment, and research data management.  Additionally, Research IT staff maintain the Digital Humanities event calendar, assist with event coordination, solicit profiles for campus digital humanities projects, write and solicit posts for the digital humanities blog, and contribute to strategic planning for the Digital Humanities initiative.

Email digitalhumanities [at] berkeley [dot] edu to get in touch with a digital humanities consultant.

The mission of the Graduate Assembly is to improve the lives of University of California, Berkeley graduate students and to foster a vibrant, inclusive graduate student community.

The Graduate Assembly is the official representative body of the graduate and professional students at the University of California, Berkeley. The fundamental principles of the Graduate Assembly are the promotion of a vibrant student social life, inclusiveness, progressive activism, community service, educational improvement, and professional development. In service to these principles the Graduate Assembly advocates for students, funds student groups on campus, and directly manages a variety of projects.

The Graduate Fellowships Office coordinates many extramural fellowships and serves as a resource center for students seeking information on fellowships funded by the University and outside sources. For more information, contact the Fellowships Office, or visit the Graduate Fellowships & Awards section of this site for applications and deadline information.

MCB295 is a career and professional development seminar series for life science PhDs organized by students in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. Each weekly session features a panel of speakers from a variety of careers who share their post-PhD paths. In addition, they host workshops on topics in career development, including networking, resume building, interview techniques, and negotiation skills.

The Office for Graduate Diversity is a resource for educationally and financially disadvantaged students and underrepresented students throughout their academic careers at Berkeley. The Office for Graduate Diversity outreach includes traveling to various universities and colleges throughout the country, conducting informational workshops on applying to graduate school, and providing individual advising to prospective students. It also co-coordinates various outreach conferences and events to provide students opportunities to visit the Berkeley campus or learn more about what Berkeley has to offer.

Grad school is a great place to gain scientific expertise – but that’s hardly the only thing you’ll need in your future as a Ph.D. Are you ready to lead a group? Manage your coworkers? Mentor budding scientists? To address the many interpersonal issues that arise in a scientific workplace, grad students from Chemistry, Physics, and MCB founded SLAM: Science Leadership and Management.

SLAM leads a seminar series focused on understanding the many interpersonal interactions critical for success in a scientific lab, as well as some practical aspects of lab management.  The target audience for this course is upper-level science graduate students with broad interests and backgrounds, and the skills discussed will be applicable to a variety of career paths. Postdocs are also welcome to attend.

SLAM is sponsored by QB3 and VSPA, with additional support from the Department of Chemistry and the LBNL Chemical Sciences Division.

Thriving in Science is a campus-wide, professional development initiative at UC Berkeley that is intended to provide graduate students and postdoctoral researchers with the resources and support to make the most of their academic training. Thriving in Science seeks to empower graduate students and postdoctoral researchers to become more engaged, resilient, and creative scientists by directly addressing the real-world (often personal) challenges that are encountered in the course of a career in scientific research.

Thriving in Science seeks to address the personal challenges that specifically hinder scientific development by providing opportunities to discuss topics ranging from minimizing anxiety and managing interpersonal relationships to adopting strategies to recognize and prevent professional fatigue. As is now widely recognized within the scientific community, these aspects of our professional training are critical to a successful career in science and yet are often not adequately included as part of graduate and postdoctoral training. This shortcoming is adversely affecting not only the day-to-day lives and professional aspirations of younger scientists-in-training, but also the long-term, collective success of academic science as a whole.

The Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities encourages an interdisciplinary approach to scholarship, fostered innovation in research, and promoted intellectual conversation among individuals from the humanities and related academic disciplines. The Center offers an array of fellowship and grant programs designed to support research and scholarship at all levels of the university community. They also support more than 60 interdisciplinary working groups and co-sponsor a wide variety of lectures and conferences with other departments and units on campus. The Townsend Center sponsors several types of graduate student workshops throughout the year ranging from fellowship information sessions and research proposal preparation to public speaking workshops.

The Visiting Scholar and Postdoc Affairs (VSPA) Program was established to accommodate scholars with a Ph.D. or equivalent degree to pursue their research and professional interests on the Berkeley campus. The VSPA Program strives to, among other things, foster a robust postdoctoral community and enhance the postdoctoral experience at Berkeley; continue efforts to better understand the training and development environment offered to postdoctoral appointees; ensure that the educational needs and career interests of the postdoctoral scholars are being met; provide oversight and support of the Berkeley Postdoctoral Association, a campus professional society that fosters a professional network amongst the approximately 1200 postdoctoral appointees; and provide on-going training of campus staff and faculty who work with visiting researcher scholar and postdoctoral appointees.