Cal Day 2017: What will you change?

What will you change in this generation?

The organizers of Cal Day — UC Berkeley’s free annual public open house, taking place this Saturday, April 22 — invite the public to explore that question through the more than 400 events that will showcase Berkeley and its impact on the world. Every year, some 40,000 people from the Bay Area and beyond visit the campus on Cal Day.

Among the highlights of Cal Day 2017 will be:

• At 8 a.m. in California Memorial Stadium, an early-morning welcome for newly admitted students by Chancellor Nicholas Dirks and Nobel laureate Randy Schekman.
• From 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., a free tour of the Hearst Museum of Anthropology’s newly renovated gallery and an opening exhibit that probes our relationship with the human-made things around us.
• “The Glorious All-American Total Solar Eclipse of August 2017!,” a 9:30 a.m. talk in 1 Pimentel Hall by Berkeley astronomer Alex Filippenko about the upcoming Aug. 17 total eclipse of the sun.
• “California and the Climate Fight: Our State’s New Relationship with Washington and the World,” a climate action policy panel discussion at 10:30 a.m. in Kroeber Hall.
• A Cal football spring game at 11 a.m. in California Memorial Stadium.
• Stand Up for Science, a nationwide day of support for science that will include a rally at noon on Memorial Glade, a 1 p.m. panel discussion in Sutardja Dai Hall and spots on campus to write or draw messages about what science means to you and your future.
• A Berkeley Talks event at 3 p.m. on Memorial Glade, at which Chancellor Dirks will converse with several campus Olympians about their experiences at recent Olympic games, what it means to represent one’s country and life as a student-athlete at a very academically demanding university like Berkeley.
• A 4:30 p.m. concert on Memorial Glade featuring SUPERB: Allah-Las, a Los Angeles-based rock band.

“Each year Cal Day has a theme, and this year we’re highlighting how Berkeley is a place where change begins,” says La Dawn Duvall, executive director of Berkeley’s Visitor and Parent Services in the Office of Communications and Public Affairs. “Our guests will see the evidence all around them as they explore lectures, exhibits, demonstrations and performances in a broad array of academic fields and venues across campus.”

Prospective students and their families are among the estimated 40,000 visitors eager to experience Cal Day. (UC Berkeley photo by Keegan Houser)

Among the new Cal Day offerings this year are several by the Graduate School of Journalism. In addition to an open house featuring photo exhibits at North Gate Hall from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., the school’s dean, Edward Wasserman, will give a 10 a.m. lecture, “Journalism Now More Than Ever,” about the importance to the public of trained journalists, like those graduating from Berkeley.

A 10:30 a.m. information session will describe the school’s new hands-on, summer-only journalism minor, which welcomed 155 students from all over campus, and from 10 countries, for the first time last summer. And at noon, film shorts from award-winning filmmakers, each featuring in-depth reporting in the public interest by journalism school students and alumni, will be shown in a two-hour mini-film festival in Room 105 of North Gate Hall.

The school also plans to have “roving student reporters walking around campus doing short, 20- to 30-second interviews with Cal Day-goers asking them about Cal Day and what they think about journalism today,” says assistant dean Roia Ferrazares. “Interviews will also be captured on the red carpet in the North Gate Hall courtyard from 11 a.m. until noon. The interviews will be posted on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter at #sharecalday@ucbsoj, and visitors can watch our social media editor in action in the North Gate Hall library.”

Visitors to the Valley Life Sciences Building gaze at a life-size cast of a Tyrannosaurus rex fossil reconstructed by the Museum of Paleontology. (UC Berkeley photo by Keegan Houser)

Many Cal Day visitors are prospective students and their families, who will flock to dozens of tents at the Information Marketplace, at South Hall, by the Campanile, where representatives for academic departments and more will answer questions about their programs. Student organizations will have tables set up on Upper and Lower Sproul plazas.

Tours of all kinds – motorized cable car, walking, housing, college and school, and library and museum tours – run throughout the day. Student guides will offer tours of the central campus in both Spanish and Mandarin. There’s even a one-hour tour of the campus’s natural landscape, led by the Forestry Club, and a self-guided Berkeley Arts + Design tour being hosted on Instagram and on location that will offer a scavenger hunt and a drawing to win prizes.