Project: Social Networking
@ Berkeley (Archived)
@ Berkeley (Archived)
Build social networks within the Berkeley community
Background: With some 10,000 of the world's top graduate students, there's great potential for amazing personal and professional relationships at Berkeley. The difficulty is that graduate students' majors are chosen from day one, they don't live in dorms, they have no "general education" requirements, and, really, the whole point is to focus and concentrate on one sub-sub-area of research, so the number of (very similar) people they're likely to interact with on a daily basis is small.
To explore the graduate community outside of computer science, I first joined the Graduate Assembly (the grad student government) as my department's delegate. It was a good experience for my first year. It introduced me to the campus. The meetings had delegates from all of the other departments at Cal. Unfortunately, the interaction between the delegates was pretty limited.
The Grad Social Club (GSC) was the one organization on campus with a mission to directly address the lack of interdepartmental interaction. In 2001, though, when I started, the club was in its death throes. In the summer of 2002, I began to rebuild the GSC from scratch, recruiting 60+ people to help in planning and outreach. My partner (co-chair), Carolyn White, and I redeveloped the organization, expanding the quantity, quality, and diversity of events, drawing a significantly larger and departmentally-diverse attendance than previous years. It was extremely successful and rewarding.
Still, while our events drew large and diverse groups of people, there were some inertial forces keeping cliques of friends from mixing and meeting new people. I attributed some of the problem to the lack of known shared interests between attendees. To rectify this, I created a new division of the GSC that would self-generate small, discussion-oriented events, bringing together people with common interests: the Forum On Current Issues (FOCI). Modeled as a mini-Commonwealth Club, it was successful within test domains and acted as a strong proof of concept. Unfortunately, to fulfill its full potential required additional time and resources that I could not provide after its first year. The effort, though, was still quite valuable and enjoyable.
Status: Transferred GSC leadership in 2004-2005. FOCI was later reincorporated into the GSC.
Get Involved: Help build a stronger grad community at Berkeley! Join the GSC! It's a great experience, with work that everyone appreciates. Interested in redeveloping FOCI? Feel free to contact me for materials.
Related Projects:
Communication - marketing
Leadership & Management - execution
Background: With some 10,000 of the world's top graduate students, there's great potential for amazing personal and professional relationships at Berkeley. The difficulty is that graduate students' majors are chosen from day one, they don't live in dorms, they have no "general education" requirements, and, really, the whole point is to focus and concentrate on one sub-sub-area of research, so the number of (very similar) people they're likely to interact with on a daily basis is small.
To explore the graduate community outside of computer science, I first joined the Graduate Assembly (the grad student government) as my department's delegate. It was a good experience for my first year. It introduced me to the campus. The meetings had delegates from all of the other departments at Cal. Unfortunately, the interaction between the delegates was pretty limited.
The Grad Social Club (GSC) was the one organization on campus with a mission to directly address the lack of interdepartmental interaction. In 2001, though, when I started, the club was in its death throes. In the summer of 2002, I began to rebuild the GSC from scratch, recruiting 60+ people to help in planning and outreach. My partner (co-chair), Carolyn White, and I redeveloped the organization, expanding the quantity, quality, and diversity of events, drawing a significantly larger and departmentally-diverse attendance than previous years. It was extremely successful and rewarding.
Still, while our events drew large and diverse groups of people, there were some inertial forces keeping cliques of friends from mixing and meeting new people. I attributed some of the problem to the lack of known shared interests between attendees. To rectify this, I created a new division of the GSC that would self-generate small, discussion-oriented events, bringing together people with common interests: the Forum On Current Issues (FOCI). Modeled as a mini-Commonwealth Club, it was successful within test domains and acted as a strong proof of concept. Unfortunately, to fulfill its full potential required additional time and resources that I could not provide after its first year. The effort, though, was still quite valuable and enjoyable.
Status: Transferred GSC leadership in 2004-2005. FOCI was later reincorporated into the GSC.
Get Involved: Help build a stronger grad community at Berkeley! Join the GSC! It's a great experience, with work that everyone appreciates. Interested in redeveloping FOCI? Feel free to contact me for materials.
Related Projects:Communication - marketing
Leadership & Management - execution
First Published: 8/1/2005;
Archived: 1/1/2007
Archived: 1/1/2007