The California Alliance for Graduate Education and Professoriate (UC-AGEP), recently had its inaugural annual retreat at Stanford on April 4-5. The UC-AGEP is an effort led by UC Berkeley, UCLA, Caltech, and Stanford to propel the advancement of underrepresented minority PhD students in STEM fields to top-tier academic positions.
The retreat, themed Leveraging Our Influence, brought together graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, research scientists, and faculty from the four institutions and national labs in California. As the theme implied, the retreat focused on how to use the Alliance to build networks through mentoring and communications both scientifically and socially amongst these top four universities, “to ‘leverage the participants’ influence to achieve the greatest positive effects”, as the weekend conference itinerary outlines. The schedule consisted of many interactive workshops and primers for advancing STEM education and careers, discussion sessions on mentoring between students and faculty across the universities, and one-on-one meetings between faculty and students.
Read the full story: The Berkeley Graduate