Blog - Page 108 of 113 - Berkeley Graduate Division

Image of rankings graph of US News and World Report, and other ranking agencies

October 19, 2010

Other rankings — To be (measured) is to be perceived (quantitatively, qualitatively, and through a variety of lenses)

In an August 29 feature entitled "30 Ways to Rate a College" for the Chronicle of Higher Education, Alex Richards and Ron Coddington created a clear and revealing interactive map to the major rankings showing what measures are important to each rater — and how few they actually have in common.

October 7, 2010

Berkeley tops the list of new DOE Graduate Fellowships recipients

With 19 out of 150 fellowships awarded — over an eighth of the total, more than any other university — UC Berkeley welcomes the lion's share of students in energy studies across its college and departments who will be studying here for up to three years, with support from the U.S. Department of Energy.

September 16, 2010

Welcome back! — New writer’s room and orientation announcements

Now it's back to the real world with classes to teach, seminars to engage, experiments to plan, qualifying exams to study for, breakthroughs to realize, manuscripts to finish, and hoods to don!

September 3, 2010

The Distinguished Teaching Award, 2010: a new crop of four and a brief reunion

Four professors who individually teach in the fields of computer science, linguistics, engineering, and business are now part of a rare and highly valued subtribe on campus, the recipients of the Distinguished Teaching Award, which is bestowed annually by the Academic Senate's Committee on Teaching.

September 3, 2010

The GSAOs in your programs: they’re there for you

Each semester the Graduate Student Affairs Officers get together to stay up to date on the latest opportunities for, and policy changes affecting, the students in their programs.

August 11, 2010

A “solar suitcase” brings light and communication to health workers in remote regions — and honors to a public health doctoral candidate

Laura Stachel is a doctoral candidate in the School of Public Health. She's also an M.D. — an obstetrician who earned that degree at UCSF.

August 11, 2010

GSAOs — A Resource For Your Success

If you are a student who is new to campus — welcome! If you are filing a thesis or dissertation this month — congratulations!

August 11, 2010

Progress report: two down, one nearly up, and one to go

(Photo: Dick Cortén) On its journey to a new building, the School of Public Health has vacated its ancestral headquarters (Warren Hall) and watched (from temporary space in University Hall and elsewhere on campus) as that timeworn structure was obliterated (in 2007) and its substitute, the Li Ka Shing…

August 11, 2010

Energy Secretary advances nano science in spare time

Apparently the most-Berkeley person in the Obama cabinet, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu (former director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley Ph.D. '76), makes scientific contributions, and news, even while he takes it easy. "In his down time, often while flying somewhere," reported AP science writer Seth Borenstein, Chu "relaxes by tackling a scientific conundrum and stretching the limits of technology."

August 11, 2010

Energy-efficiency expert (and grad alum) Karl Brown is a champ

An instrument box mounted in the depths of a campus classroom and office building is hardly a headline-grabbing weapon against climate change. But because buildings are estimated to be responsible for nearly half of all greenhouse-gas emissions, cutting-edge monitoring systems in fact are crucial tools for reducing global warming.

August 11, 2010

Joining a global campus network, Berkeley launches a new master’s degree program in sustainability

Recognizing the proven leadership of campus faculty and students in addressing climate change, poverty and public health, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in May selected the University of California, Berkeley, as one of 10 universities worldwide to launch a new master’s degree program in development practice.

August 11, 2010

Graduate students drive UC research and help keep top faculty

Julie Kang, a psychology graduate student at UC Riverside, stated the case more baldly than most: "Without graduate students, (the university) quite honestly would come to a screeching halt."

July 19, 2010

The Berkeley underpinnings of Google’s July 4th salute

The world’s best-known search engine varies its logo playfully on its homepage on holidays and whenever it feels like it. This Fourth of July, it featured the basic DNA of a Rube Goldberg device. One of the country's most popular cartoonists, Goldberg started here, in the first issues of Cal’s best-known and longest-lasting humor magazine, the California Pelican, which was founded in 1903 and survived, amusing and outraging people for eight decades, give or take.

July 19, 2010

Just released: Mark Twain’s posthumous poke at interviewers

The Rundown, the blog of The News Hour on PBS, has just published an exclusive: for “the first known time in print,” an essay by Mark Twain on the journalistic interview. In the course of Twain’s career, he was frequently interviewed by reporters, not often to his satisfaction.

July 19, 2010

I School Ph.D. students enlist in an all-volunteer boot camp — no push-ups, no marching, just lots and lots of writing

For two weeks in May, the lone “bong” of the Campanile chiming one p.m. signaled the end of a long morning of labor for a determined group of Information School doctoral students, plus one from the Haas School of Business.

July 19, 2010

The new Dissertation Writer’s Room opens its door to all doctoral candidates

Graduate Division Dean Andrew Szeri and Doe Library's Graduate Services staff have teamed up to offer a new space dedicated to doctoral students advanced to candidacy: the Dissertation Writer's Room, which opened June 21 in Room 215 of the Doe Library.

Graduate Student Instructors in a large room

July 19, 2010

More than 270 GSIs are singled out for the quality of their teaching

276 GSIs from 61 graduate programs were granted this recognition, which is now just over a decade old. The award recognizes the excellence of their teaching. Selections are made according to detailed guidelines, following criteria which may include skills in presenting course materials, capacity to promote critical thinking, and skills in developing course materials that promote learning, as well as evidence such as evaluations by students, letters of nomination by faculty or students, and classroom observation by faculty.

10 winners of the Teaching Effectiveness Award pose together

July 15, 2010

Creative—and effective—solutions win honors for 11 GSIs

The Graduate Division’s Teaching Effectiveness Awards were presented May 13 in the Women’s Faculty Club. The winners identified a teaching/learning problem in their own classes, laboratories, and sections, then came up with a method, strategy, or idea to address the problem, implemented it, measured its effectiveness, and described the process in an essay. Their essays become part of a permanent archive.

July 15, 2010

Love among the technically-inclined

Juliet Holwill had clearly come to trust her fellow UC Berkeley engineering grad student and fellow Aussie Ben Rubinstein, because one sunny September day in 2006 she let him pick her up in a car, blindfold her, and drive her off to an unknown destination.

July 15, 2010

Grad Division and Graduate Assembly team up to honor mentors

In the 1970s, the Berkeley campus was, a veteran faculty member told a concerned new assistant professor, “not a loving institution.”