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Spotlight On: Carolyn Chee

Now Open: One-Stop Service-Shopping for Grad Students

Carolyn Chee is in charge of three key offices in the Graduate Division, and she's new, only here since mid-September. But there's reason to think she's up to the task.

In a slightly earlier incarnation, she applied to be an astronaut. When you meet her eye, she looks back at you through glasses, and that's all that prevented her from going up into space, which she had wanted to do “ever since I was a little kid.”

So she worked instead on interplanetary probes — familiar names like Magellan, Galileo, and Voyager — at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory for five years, at the end of which she returned to Berkeley to add a Ph.D. to her string of degrees from this campus, and some post-doc work, all in mechanical engineering. Which doesn’t have a great deal to do with what she did next, or what she's doing now, but life is like that.

She worked in the for-profit sector during the exciting dot-com bubble, but didn’t like it much. The notion of working with students and teaching had new appeal for her, and she soon found herself near this campus, working for UC Berkeley Extension, giving classes and running engineering and technology programs for adult learners. But so near was still so far to someone who likes Cal as much as she does, and when the chance to work on campus in the Graduate Division appeared, she jumped at it. And landed it.

The units she now directs are vital to the progress/welfare of grad students throughout their time at Berkeley. The Graduate Fellowships Office is the conduit for the financial support without which many grad students couldn't afford to go for that higher degree. The Graduate Appointments Office makes sure some other paths are open for earning while you learn: student academic positions such as Graduate Student Instructor, Graduate Student Researcher, Reader, and Tutor. The Graduate Degrees Office monitors students' progress toward their degrees and, when the goal is in sight, is the place where they file their thesis or dissertation.

What Chee is tackling right from the start is to bring those offices together under one umbrella with a new name, Graduate Services, with a central counter you can come to, she says, “and have one place to ask a question and get an answer.” It's a project that fits what she likes most about this campus: its openness. When she was school-shopping, Berkeley stood out, and not just academically. “I went to visit the schools that accepted me,” she says, “at probably the worst times, weather-wise, thinking that if I could survive that visit, I could survive the rest of the year there. Texas was the ultimate in humidity, MIT was bitter cold, and the students just kind of walked along the walls and didn’t seem to interact or enjoy themselves. Berkeley people seemed a bit more personable, more accessible. When I was in grad school here, one of the faculty asked me 'What do you do for fun?' I'm not sure that would have happened elsewhere.”

“I really hope to take the humane part of Berkeley that attracted me here and help make it even more a part of the student services we offer in the Graduate Division.” She hadn't needed much of that when she was in school. “Some of the programs that are big enough, like mechanical engineering, take very good care of you. Not all of them can do that. In Grad Div, we're here to help people in all programs, all sizes, to make the experience less stressful.” She's well aware that any sizeable bureaucracy can seem intimidating, but hopes being the public face of Graduate Services will help put students at ease.

Enhancing her credibility — and a testament to her energy level — is the fact that she's a mom, four times over. “They all have their birthdays in a seven-week period near Thanksgiving, so by then their ages will be eight, five, three, and one. You know what my motto is right now? 'Sleep is overrated.' ”

“One of the most inspiring things that I've seen about kids so far,” says Chee, “is when they’re learning how to walk. My youngest is going through it right now. They walk, they fall down; they walk, they fall down. They hit their head, they look to you to see if there’s a reaction, but they don’t cry. And they turn around two seconds later and get up to try again. They just never give up!”

“We all managed to get through stages like that when we were just little kids,” she continues. “Later on, it seems hard to tap into that kind of determination, but it’s in there somewhere! We just have to find it.”

— Dick Cortén