(Back left) Jenna and Emma give a guided tour of hyperbolic space. (Front right) Pauldeep challenges student to a game of Nim.

In a nutshell, Pi Day was a group of Compass students preparing some fun math- and science-flavored hands-on activities to present to a group of high school students. We brought materials to build nifty gliders that look like they shouldn’t be able to fly but do, a worksheet filled with some unusual math problems that require a certain amount of creativity, and awesome demonstrations of spherical and hyperbolic spaces.

What we did as a group was to come together once a week (Wednesday nights, 6-8, you should come to our super-fun meetings in the Compass office because we are still doing stuff) to develop these projects and test them out. We together to brainstorm the projects and pick the ones we found most interesting (and what we assumed the high school students would find most interesting), and once we settled on our three booths we spread out into the three semi-independent subgroups: gliders, weird math problems, and what I like to call the Crazy Awesome Geometry group.

When March 14 we all piled into a car and drove to the Making Waves facility to bring our gifts of math-y wonderfulness to the students.

Personally, some of the most memorable things I’d done in high school were projects like these, where my teachers went beyond the curriculum to engage us as students. It was times like those where you remember that learning is actually fun, and not just a seemingly endless series of homework, homework, test; homework, homework, test. Giving those experiences to other students was really rewarding. But don’t it think was all altruism on my part. I enjoyed our booth (Crazy Awesome Geometry) so much that I’d say my participation was almost selfishly motivated. I mean, there were balloons involved. Nothing says “fun” like balloons.

I originally got involved in the High School Outreach group through last semester’s Shadow Day. I pretty much just responded to some emails and showed up where and when I was supposed to, but I had a lot of fun introducing my high school shadow to the Cal campus. So when Ana asked me at the beginning of this semester if I wanted to come to the high school outreach meeting that week I said yes.

When I showed up to my first meeting, the group was brainstorming for the upcoming Pi Day at Making Waves. In the midst of all the ideas being thrown around, Drew suggested we do something on non-Euclidian geometry. My first reaction: “Ew, geometry.” The last time I took a geometry class I was a freshman in high school, and all I remember is that there is a Side-Angle-Side postulate but not an Angle-Side-Side postulate—and even that I had to double-check on Google just now. But then Drew started talking about how weird stuff happens in spaces that aren’t flat, and I was actually interested. Straight lines aren’t actually straight in curved spaces, and you can measure pi to be something other than 3.14.

I was captivated. As I got more involved in the project, I was telling everyone who would sit still long enough all about the cool things I was learning. “Did you know you can make a triangle with two right angles on a balloon?” “Did you know you can measure pi to be 2 on a beach ball?” I didn’t feel like I was “giving up” two hours of my week every Wednesday night. It was more like a scheduled recess every week, and it was something I really looked forward to. I was getting excited about a subject—geometry—that I’d originally written of as “when am I ever going to use this?” It was a completely different look at the subject. Instead of finding areas of circles, and memorizing all those horrible proofs, I was building a model of hyperbolic space out of paper rings.

The whole experience was, for lack of a better adjective, Compass-y.

Shadow Day lab tours. From left to right: Jenna Pinkham, Melina, Ariana, Mr. Towey, Dimitri Dounas-Frazer. Photo taken by Ana Aceves.

Introduction by Dimitri Dounas-Frazer

The Fall 2011 semester saw Compass delve into high school outreach for the first time. Compass partnered with the Making Waves Education Program for two events: (1) Shadow Day, where high school seniors followed Compass undergrads to their college classes, and (2) a  math fair called Radical Pi Day, which was described in an earlier post. This post will focus on Shadow Day.

Planning Shadow Day was a bit of a headache; I needed to recruit about 10 Compass students, Armando (my contact at Making Waves) also needed to recruit students, and we both had to coordinate everybody’s schedules. Although 11 Compass undergrads signed up to participate, only 3 high school students ended up coming to Berkeley. So, at the end of the day, only a handful of Compass students were paired with shadows: Jenna, Ayman, Kristine, and Jaime. In addition, Ana, Harjit, and Punit made guest appearances at breakfast and lunch. (As a sidenote, Armando and I plan to streamline the recruitment process for next semester.)

The day started with breakfast and ice breakers on the Berkeley campus in the Helmholtz Room. After breakfast, some student pairs went immediately to class. Others had about an hour to tour laboratories in the Physics Department before heading to lecture. Everybody regrouped at I-House for lunch, and then dispersed again for afternoon classes. By the end of the day, each high school shadow had attended a few of the following courses: Physics 7A, Physics 7B, Math 1B, Math 53, Political Science 1, and Western Civilization. Before the Making Waves students and faculty left, I met with them in the Compass office to say goodbye. Everyone was extremely gracious, and the teachers seemed eager to do this again in the spring.

Compass is a large program, and only a small subset of us had the chance to participate in Shadow Day. In order to share our experience with our peers, I’ve compiled reflections from Ayman, Kristine, Jenna, and Melina. Melina was one of the shadows, and she ended up visiting Berkeley a couple more times to tour labs in the Physics and Chemistry Departments.

I’d simply signed up for the shadow event out of curiosity, but I’d never expected it to be a learning experience for myself, seeing what high school students expected of college and probe my own expectations. It made me take a step back and look at my own transition from high school to college and  examine what it all meant to me. And there’s the satisfaction of knowing that you can make a contribution in helping a high school student familiarize themself with what awaits them after high school.

Ayman Kamruddin, college freshman

Compass Shadow Day was great success, both for the participants as well as for the shadow students.  I really enjoyed having Zina attend my physics lecture as that day my physics professor was extremely exciting, and I am glad she got to witness physics at its best.  Having a Compass Shadow Day also brightened up my own day as I came from a math midterm and had the high school students brighten up my day.

I also enjoyed having lunch with the students and talking to them about their own college plans.  It brought back fond memories of my own college application process last year, and I was eager to share some of my own insights from what I learned from the process.  Thereafter I took Zina to my English discussion section and then had to say goodbye.

What I loved most about Shadow Day was that even though Zina was not interested in studying physical sciences, she still got a taste of what it is like to study a physical science as well as see a humanities class.  I believe that only by seeing all of the options available will she make the best choice about her own specific path and interests, and I was happy she got exposed to a wide variety of courses.

Kristine Rezai, college freshman

As a student in Making Waves, a college preparatory program located in Richmond, I have participated in events coordinated collaboratively by Making Waves and the Compass Project. In October, I attended Shadow Day and sat in UCB math and science courses. I first visited Physics 7B. That day, the professor covered circuits, and while I understood the basics initially, by the end, I was lost. Nevertheless, sitting in a college-level physics class was a refreshing experience that showed me what college could be like. I also enjoyed sitting in Math 53. I really like math at school and I enjoyed seeing some of the more complicated topics in multi-variable calculus that I could learn in the future.

Soon after, I also visited some Physics and Chemistry laboratories at UCB. I toured a couple of Atomic Physics labs, and I really liked getting a feel of the setup for these types of labs. I especially enjoyed visiting the physical chemistry labs and being back at Cal since my summer there. I hope that these events between Making Waves and the Compass Project continue. For other kids like me who are interested in math and science, this is definitely a wonderful opportunity.

Melina, high school senior

I really enjoyed Shadow Day! At first I was a little bit ojealous and was all “I wish I could have shadowed someone at Berkeley,” but it didn’t take long where I was just enjoying showing my shadow around.  Plus I got to go to some fun labs—always a plus.

Being a Shadow Day participant also got me thinking about my classes differently. I took my shadow to Physics 7B and Math 53, classes where you really can’t just show up and expect to understand everything (and, as far as 53 goes, you can’t really expect to understand everything right off the bat even if you’ve been coming to class every day). So it was interesting sitting there being like “Will my shadow understand this? What can I say to her that will help the material make more sense?” Having a high school shadow prompted me to think about the material in a way fundamentally different than “Ohmygod why is the professor writing so fast? Is this going to be on the midterm? Must take better notes!”

In all, Shadow Day was a really great, beneficial experience that I would love to have again.

Jenna Pinkham, college sophomore

[Note: This entry was edited after it was posted in order to incorporate an additional quote from a participant.]

Radical Monte π-thons. Left to right: Drew Edelberg, Yongchan Kim, Ana Aceves, Salman Kahn, and Dimitri Dounas-Frazer. Not shown: Marvin Alcantara and Phillip Merlo.

Introduction by Dimitri Dounas-Frazer, grad student

Last summer, I was hanging out with a friend of mine, Armando Franco. Armando teaches math for the Making Waves Education Program, an after-school program that supports urban, low-income children on their path towards gaining acceptance to college. We started talking about working together, and he suggested that Compass might be able to help Making Waves with two projects: (1) taking high school juniors and seniors to college-level math and science classes, and (2) designing events for their fall math fair, called Radical Pi Day. In this post, I’d like to share with you how Compass participated in Radical Pi Day.

A group of six undergrads (Ana, Drew, Marvin, Phillip, Salman, and Yongchan) and one graduate student (me) got together to plan a couple events for Radical Pi Day. We decided to design two activities, one based on the Monty Hall Problem and another on Monte Carlo estimation of π by tossing coins on a checkerboard. (Note: Both activities were originally suggested by Joel Corbo, an awesome graduate student who has been working with Compass basically since its inception. Thanks, Joel!) These activities were chosen because they are somewhat counter-intuitive problems that can be understood using basic probability and geometry arguments. Plus, we were able to run an exciting game show, complete with glitz, glam, music, and prizes!

We called ourselves the “Radical Monte π-thons,” a name that incorporates all aspects of our project. We met every Tuesday at 8:30 pm. Sometimes we got together on Thursday afternoons, too. At our meetings, we learned probability, wrote computer programs, painted signs, and ate a lot of pizza. When it was time for the actual event, we piled in a car and headed to Richmond. That night, we put on an awesome (and educational) version of Monty Hall’s game show “Let’s Make a Deal!” Also, high school students determined the value of π/4 with 8% accuracy just by tossing a couple pennies onto a square grid. Well, okay… they tossed a couple hundred pennies, but it was still an impressive feat!

To share our experience with the rest of the Compass community, we decided to post our reflections in this blog. Below are contributions from Phillip, Yongchan, and Ana. Mr. Rooben Morgan, the coordinator of the Math Empowerment Program (MEP) at Making Waves, also sent us a summary of the event. Members of the Compass facebook group can find pictures of our adventure here.

The Monte π-thon project was an excellent way for me to immerse myself into Compass. As a freshman, this was my first way of participating in the group outside of the summer program and Physics 98, and it was a great experience. Every Tuesday for two months the group met and creatively (and cheerfully) crafted a design for a booth at Making Waves High School’s Radical π Day math fair. By working in the group, I learned quite a bit. Compass’ educational goal, as I understand it, is to develop a diverse and supportive community of science-minded thinkers. Now that I have actually worked to contribute positively as a part of that community I appreciate that aspiration a lot more.

Phillip Merlo, freshman

I was one of a handful of students who were interested in studying physics. I joined Compass at the end of summer 2011 and have attended various events, and gained the opportunity to participate in high school outreach. However, I wasn’t sure if I could manage to do high school outreach. Furthermore, I joined in the middle of the process and I didn’t know what was going on. Thus, I pretty much did what the other group members told me to do. In the mean time, I met with group members, discussed events and prepared some events/materials. Besides preparation, it was a great opportunity for me to socialize with other Compass teachers and students.

On the day of the fair, I went to a high school in Richmond, CA, with other Compass students and teachers. The size of the school was smaller than I expected. I, along with other members, did what we had planned before. We set up the math-related games called “Monty π-thon”. Surprisingly, high school students were interested in trying out some of our games. It seemed they were enjoying themselves, and our prizes quickly ran out. The event lasted about 2 hours, and students seemed interested.

I was glad at the end because high school students were interested and enjoyed our outreach. I hope this simple outreach fosters high school students’ curiosity and leads them to become physicists.

Yongchan Kim, freshman

I slowly gathered my belongings after my 4pm class on Wednesday, Nov. 2^nd and made my way toward the door. I had half an hour to relax and mentally prepare for what was to come. I left my apartment dressed ready to impress, I knew I wasn’t going to have time to get ready between the end of my class and departure time. I decided I could go for a snack, so I headed over to the GBC on Sproul for frozen yogurt. I figured the rest would be hungry so I bought a few snacks for the trip to Richmond. After weeks of preparation the day had arrived. We, the Radical Monte π-Thons were going to a math fair in Richmond hosted by Making Waves. We had run over the scenario time and time again. We were ready.

I finally made my way to the meeting spot at 4:20pm. I knew I was early so I settled down on a bench nearby to finish my frozen yogurt and contemplate on a trip I was about to embark on. Around 4:30pm I see Dimitri coming through the door, big smile on his face, fancy pants on, and arms full of our materials. I quickly rushed to help him with our things and carried it over to the car he rented. However, by 4:45pm we were still in Berkeley waiting for a team member. Once we realized that he wasn’t going to make it we departed map in hand and with excitement for what lay ahead.

We arrived 15 minutes late, but quickly set up our booth. I must admit it was not what I expected. I had envisioned a big cafeteria with plenty of booths on square tables lined up along the wall. Instead, I was encountered with round tables spread out sporadically in a relatively small cafeteria. Nonetheless, we adapted to what we had. I went to my station ready to work with the first student. When we finally announced we were ready, the students began to come over, some more shy than others. I could tell they were interested in what we were doing. Our multiple monitors and game show music were hard to ignore. I kindly asked the first student if he’d like to play. I caught the hesitation, but it took little convincing. And thus Radical Monte π-Thons made their debut.

After a while, students were beginning to catch on. More and more were deciding to switch their choice because they saw a reward, the probabilities flashing in the background also influenced their decision. Half an hour later, we split off into groups to offer an explanation of the benefits of switching buckets. I must admit I did not fully understand the probability and reasoning behind Monte Hall, but I received help from a team member. Once we gave the explanation, the students knew what was best. Many of them stuck to the initial strategy of changing their option. Students kept playing over and over until they got enough money to pay for a coveted prize. But before the 2 hours were up, the number of students interested in playing had dwindled, especially because we had run out of prizes.

By the end of the night, the students were happy and we were happy. We gathered our belongings, bid the students farewell and departed to Berkeley content at our work. I arrived with a different set-up in mind, but as a team we worked together to adapt to what we were given. We worked together to teach the students of Making Waves something new and create a new ripple of knowledge.

Ana Aceves, sophomore

The Math Empowerment Program (MEP) at Making Waves Education Program and Compass jointly presented Radical Pi on 11/2/11. Radical Pi has become a mainstay of MEP’s annual activities, where the teachers in the department organize a fun space for students to explore math in a variety of ways, and not as a series of algorithms to be learnt. Some of the activities have included logic, puzzles, bridge/tower-building competitions, mandala coloring, estimation of volume weight, and quantity (how many jelly beans are in the jar?).

This year, in addition to the many usual fares, Compass representatives manned two tables at the event: 1) Monty Hall “Let’s Make a Deal” and 2) Monte Carlo approximation of Pi. Students were able to interact with undergrads from UC Berkeley and learn about Statistics and Geometry concepts in a fun and interactive way. About 35 high-school students attended the event and tried many of the games, and experienced numbers in very new ways. By helping students see that math can be experienced and utilized in many ways, MEP hopes to reduce anxiety and alienation that is often seen amongst high school students in urban communities such as Richmond.

One of the core philosophies of MEP is to help student develop an appreciation for math, and Radical Pi is one of the more fun events that marries math/numbers and fun/exploration. Students come and engage in the activities voluntarily, without pressure of performance or accuracy. Very often, they realize they have a capacity for mathematical applications outside the classroom model. In the future, we hope to incorporate more distinctive [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics] activities that speak to knowledge and career fields.

Rooben Morgan, MEP coordinator

Oobleck Drop – Microscopic View of Oobleck:

OOBS – Oobleck Protection:

Fruit Ninjas – Oobleck Demonstration:

Cookin’ with Physics – Ooblek Applications

Fundraising thermometer as of August 1. Less than $650 to go!

We’re one week from the end of the line, with the top of the thermometer square in our sights. If you told me three weeks ago we would raise over $4,400 in the first week of our fundraising campaign, or that we’d be seeing donations of $10s, $100s, even $1000s from all our parents, colleagues, and even undergraduate students(!), I would probably have applauded your optimism with a condescending pat on the back and a “Sure, we’ll see…” Today, the only word I can use to describe the campaign: overwhelming.

Back in June, the Compass Project leaders were debating whether or not to spend all our personal and financial capital for the summer on a 2011 Summer Program, knowing that, at least for the time being, our bank accounts were empty. During these conversations, every time we moved away from having a program, we were pulled back. The Summer Program is really the cornerstone of our efforts, the time and place where the foundation of our diverse student community is laid. But we still faced the all-too-real problem of having no money.

Even with everyone generously donating all their time to organize and teach, we were still looking at a minimum of $7,000 to house, feed and supply the students for a one-week program. If we called in all the money we had left over from past years and old, unallocated donations, we optimistically had $3,500: $2,500 in past donations through the now defunct Big Ideas Marketplace and $1,000 in contributions from the Center for Integrative Planetary Science–thanks to a conversation between CIPS Chair Professor Geoff Marcy and myself. So half our estimate for a shoestring budget and no foreseeable source for the other half, with just a few months to go.

Earlier this summer, I realized that, independent of our Summer Program concerns, Compass needed an easy way to accept donations. The fact was, every similar organization I knew on campus was collecting online donations via websites and Facebook (at the very least). We needed a donation button! Of course, it turns out those little buttons are attached to an account, which must be linked to another account, which must be approved by several people and then correctly listed on the Give To Cal website. So much work for such a little graphic! It took most of June, but after a few handslaps for my bureaucratic missteps, we had our account and our button. Now.. how to use it?

Compass has flirted, in the past, with the idea of asking friends, family, and colleagues to contribute small donations to help the program stay vibrant, but we’d never organized around the thought. That changed in early July thanks to an incredibly generous friend of Compass. This friend, who shall remain anonymous, said during a meeting, as we all struggled over our financial situation, “Well I was planning on donating [BIG NUMBER] dollars, and my company will match that.” Putting aside that we were all floored by our friend’s generosity, this declaration switched on a lightbulb: we can raise this money! With nearly a hundred active members of Compass, if each person could generate just $100 among all their friends and family, we could fund our Summer Program complete with field trips and experimental supplies, and have money left over for our semester-long programs. Scheme hatched.

At this point, Nicole Carlson and I both decided to focus our attention on Compass’s finances and decided our campaign should shoot for a nice round number: get to $10,000 in one month. On July 7th, as I drafted and re-drafted an email appeal for the Compass leaders to send to their friends and colleagues, Nicole set us up with a Facebook event page for the campaign. We then conscripted the help of one of Compass’s tech gurus, Nathan Roth, to put together a thermometer graphic to track the progress of our campaign–a crucial gimmick! When Nicole created the event page, she made it an event to give the campaign a deadline to encourage people to act soon, and to leverage the fact that Facebook reminds invitees when an event gets close (so maybe we could generate a big push at the end). This decision to make it an “event” caused quite a bit of confusion, but this only served to generate our next greatest (if accidental) idea! But we’ll get to that soon enough.

In a back room of Stephens Hall, the Coalition meets to discuss its programs.

“Was it worth the free cheeseboard?” It’s a question I’ve been asked over and over again: while leaving a two and a half hour budget meeting or after struggling with the tenth revision of our mission statement. It’s true, I was enticed by the free cheeseboard pizza at the info session in Spring 2010 and never would have guessed how Compass would change my course through graduate school and my life as a whole.

One of my favorites activities lately has been representing Compass on UC Berkeley’s Coalition for Excellence and Diversity in Mathematics, Science and Engineering. Every other week or so, I participate in meetings with people from across campus who represent all the great programs in science, math and engineering at UC Berkeley that strive to create the same supportive community that Compass works on every day. So today (though really it took me several weeks of revisions), I published a post on the Berkeley Science Review Blog, the first of a planned series, about the Coalition and my experience with them over the past few months. Our collaboration with this awesome group has informed so much of what we do in Compass already, and it will continue to bring rewards for a long time to come. So please, if you have a few minutes, give it a read!

In this talk, we will discuss The Compass Project, a program we created at the University of California, Berkeley, five years ago to support physics students from all backgrounds.  Drawing on physics education research, we had two major goals in creating a two-week summer program for incoming freshman:  building community and helping students develop productive beliefs about what physics is and how to learn it.  This presentation will focus on a newly developed semester-long course that follows the summer program.  One focus of both the summer program and the course is developing the students capacity to see the world through physics models; students also hone their ability to communicate and collaborate productively with their peers.  We will discuss some of the successes and challenges of introducing college freshman to our model of a physics research community.

Pretty snazzy, huh?

Angie and I show off our poster making skillz.

It was wonderful to get feedback about the work we are doing at Cal –  particularly to hear what sorts of things other physics educators and education researchers wanted to know in order to judge how effective we are as a program.  Most of what people asked about made a lot of sense to us and are things that we are already planning to do (given enough time and resources, of course ).  Some wanted to hear more about how we impact our students epistemology about physics and the scientific endevour generally.  Others were curious to see some kind of data whether Compass students are more nuanced physics problem solvers than comparable peers at Cal.  Of course the most frequent question was regarding “the numbers” i.e. the numbers of our students that ultimately graduate with a degree in a physical science major.  This is a crucial question that we also want to know the answer to, but Angie and I would always push back a bit when this topic came up.  One of Compass’ main goals is certainly to increase the representation of traditionally underrepresented students as well as increase the number of students who value true diversity in the sciences (whether they themselves come from an under-represented group or not).  But I don’t think success can only be measured by whether or not students decide to join a physical science major.  The reasons why they do or don’t become a major seem as important as their ultimate decision.  Does the Compass student who decides to study slavic literature do so because she discovered a greater passion for it or because she feels like she is not particularly welcome as a woman in science?  The two are certainly not mutually exclusive, but I raise it to point out a simple fact that is rarely mentioned: the sciences – particularly physics – are pushing students away in droves.  Most student that don’t major in the physical sciences  are absolutely miserable in their physics classes. Physics class was a traumatizing experience for many of these students.  And after all who wants to major in trauma, especially if you are receiving all kinds of messages that you don’t belong.   The same goes for many people who decide to be physics majors, but often they have the resources (both personal and social) to continue on despite the difficulties.  This is one the things that UT Austin has found and are trying to address with their new campaign “Is the why keeping up at night?”, and it is something we have heard from a number institutions.

The distinction is important to me because it seems that Compass is concerned with creating a small physics community that does not discriminate against its students (actively or passively) with the aim of changing the culture within physics and the relationship between the larger physics community and society as a whole.  I know how  lofty this must sound, but I would argue that if we are concerned about “diversifying physics” this is really what it about at its heart: changing the culture of physics to welcome students of all backgrounds: wherever they are from, whatever experiences they have had, whether or not they might be the next Einstein or Feynman- or even a physicist at all for that matter.  If a Compass student decides not to formally pursue a degree in the physical sciences but loves and values the way physics views the world this is a huge success in my book and not one that is not so easily seen in “the numbers.”

In addition to getting feedback on our own work, it was wonderful to meet some new people and hear about physics education work happening around the country.  As always it was great to hear about all the work happening at Florida International University’s Physics Education group including Eric Brewe’s work on using tools from sociology to watch student communities form in formal and informal academic settings, Renee Goertzen’s research on understanding student’s sense of community, David Brooks examination of a more significant model for experimentation in the classroom with ISLE, and Yuhfen Lin’s look at how graduate physics program and how they do and do not prepare students to become physicists (I’ll refer you to Joel’s earlier post for more on that).  Although we didn’t make it to his talk, we did get a chance to speak with Mel Sabella and his colleague Kim Coble from Chicago State University about their work.  One of the more interesting talks we did manage to attend was by Prof. Sacha Kopp of UT Austin and John Rice (of Common Sense Communication) about their use of PR strategies to help recruit more students to the physics major at UT Austin.  According to their numbers, they have tripled the number of majors there in only a few years although he did not get into the breakdown of who is represented among those new graduates.  Although I am more than a bit skeptical about using focus groups and other methods from PR in improving education, and they did one thing that was thrilling:  They talked to students – lots of them, and not only the die-hard physics majors.  They talked to the students who “wouldn’t touch physics with a ten foot pole if they were stranded on a desert island and learning it  was the only way they could get off” (their words).   Now it shouldn’t require a the support of a PR firm for us to systematically listen to our students, but apparently in some cases it does.  That act alone has kicked off some interesting changes there. including new seminars to help freshman connect their intro physics classes with all of exciting research being done at UT Austin.

Angie breaks down Compass to an unsuspecting conference participant.

]]> http://www.berkeleycompassproject.org/compass-goes-to-aapt-winter-meeting/feed/ 0 http://www.berkeleycompassproject.org/compass-lectures-for-spring-2011/ http://www.berkeleycompassproject.org/compass-lectures-for-spring-2011/#comments Tue, 01 Feb 2011 04:08:16 +0000 Anna Zaniewski http://www.berkeleycompassproject.org/?p=719 Hey guys!  The Compass Lectures are back!  This semester we have SIX exciting speakers for our lecture series.  Please note that the time has been changed to WEDNESDAYS from 4-5 with tea and cookies at 3:30. Lectures will still be held in 325 LeConte.

The Spring 2011 Schedule:

Joel Fajans, Feb. 16
Alex Filippenko, Mar. 2
Damon English, Mar. 30
Mike DeWeese, Apr. 6
Benji Aleman, Apr. 20
Imke de Pater, Apr. 27

See you there!

Gina