Even by the standards of UC Berkeley, 2013 was a banner year. The campus installed its 10th chancellor, historian and anthropologist Nicholas Dirks, and celebrated its 22nd Nobel Prize winner, Randy Schekman, a professor of molecular and cell biology. And the Berkeley campus, in turn, was celebrated at film festivals and theaters around the world, as famed director Frederick Wiseman released his long-awaited four-hour, four-minute documentary At Berkeley , set to air on PBS stations on Jan. 13, 2014. It was also, notably, a year that saw the campus emerging from a period of state cutbacks — a slice of which figures vividly in At Berkeley — with its reputation for world-changing research and academic excellence unscathed.

As Wiseman has said, even a four-hour film can only scratch the surface of the richness of life at UC Berkeley. With that in mind, here’s a modest pictorial glance back at the campus in 2013, month by month.