All astronomy graduate students (and physics students working in the Astronomy Department) share in some of the various duties that keep the department going. At the beginning of each semester the Faculty Rep holds a meeting of all of the graduate students and jobs are assigned (if you don't attend, you might not like the job you get).

The rules regarding jobs are

• Everyone must have at least one job, except…
• Students in their final year are presumed to be too busy writing to take a job (they have “immunity”)
• First Year students get Colloquium Projectionist
• Second year students get Colloquium Tea
• Students not in attendance at the jobs meeting may send an email request to the faculty rep, but students attending the meeting get first dibs on all jobs

The job descriptions below should include:

• What the job entails
• How much time and energy it requires.
• How many and which students should hold it

• Colloquium Tea (Fall) – George, Viscomi, Siemion
• Colloquium Tea (Spring) – Hull, Newman, Lee
• Colloquium Tea (Funding) – Klein
• Colloquium Projectionist (Fall) – Smit, McBride
• Colloquium Projectionist (Spring) – Maas, Jones
• Tuesday Tea Czar – Fakhouri
• Grad Student/Postdoc Research Seminar (GSPS) – Huff, Strubbe
• Grad Student / Colloquium Speaker Meeting – George

• Hosting/Admissions (Fall) – Shiode
• Hosting/Admissions (Spring) – Pober, Williams, Jones, McBride
• Mentoring System Master – Bauermeister, Cook
• Public Liaisons – Lee (phone), Silverman (e-mail)
• Local Group Outreach – Alatalo
• Web Master – Williams
• Librarian – McBride
• Cosmic Gardener – Maness

• Faculty Rep – Morgan
• New Building Committee – McConnell
• Graduate Assembly Rep – Klein
• Association of Graduate Student Employees Steward (Union Rep) – Myers
• SWPS Rep (Optional) – Newman
• Undergraduate Liaison – Ganeshalingam

• Sierra Conference – Alatalo, Hansen, Perley, (Morgan)
• Department Picnic – Noh, Steele
• Ski Trip – McConnell, McCourt, Perley
• Movie Night – Miller

The big job! Colloquium Tea is a weekly event held in the lounge where the department gathers with the speaker and eats. Being a Tea Slave involves a lot of work, including acquiring funds, shopping in the days before colloquium, preparing the colloquium tea, and cleaning up. This job should be held by 3-4 second year students per semester, and at least one of them should own a car. The student in charge of funding should visit this page detailing its complexities, its secrets, and the inner workings of ASS.

The department projectionist makes sure that the weekly colloquium speakers can project their talks. This involves getting and setting up the projector (if there isn't one already in the room where the talk is to be held), maintaining the laser pointers, and asking the speaker at tea if there's anything they need. This requires weekly work (just before colloquium) and is usually held by two first year students per semester.

This is a very big job requiring the combined efforts of at least three, if not four, students, though the workload is somewhat dependent on how many students are admitted (and how many of those choose to visit) - which is unfortunately something we don't know until the spring.

The department sends out its offer letters for Spring admissions typically in early February. As soon as this occurs, at least one member of the hosting committee needs to e-mail each one of them, inviting them to come visit and providing travel and visitation information, offering to answer questions, etc. - that is, generally serving as the primary representative of the department before their visit. Once students begin making travel arrangements, the committee has to be sure to keep careful tabs on everyone's arrival and departure dates, and ask/beg/plead the other students in the department to serve as hosts during their stay and provide transportation to and from the airport. The prospectives' days must also be planned out in advance, including faculty meetings (this means contacting faculty to arrange visits) and perhaps a handful of fun activities, such as a visit to SF. When the students arrive on campus, the committee is in charge of making sure the plans are actually executed as planned, including making sure all hosts are aware of the schedules of their prospectives. Meals are usually not planned well in advance (except the occasional special meal such as a women's lunch), but someone on the committe should be in charge of recruiting students ahead of time for each potential meal, making sure that there are neither too many nor too few current students coming along to talk with the new prospectives.

This large role breaks down into numerous smaller roles, including:

• E-mail liaison - in charge of contacting prospectives before and after their visit to arrange travel plans and answer any early or late questions. This is probably the largest sub-job.
• Night host planner - in charge of recruiting night hosts and making sure students get there on time.
• Transportation planner - in charge of making sure students get to and from the airport.
• Faculty liaison - in charge of contacting faculty to arrange meetings with students and working out the students' schedules.
• Meal planner - in charge of gathering students for lunch and dinner (and, often, handling reimbursement for those meals.)
• Activity planner - typically a dispersed job that everyone pitches in for.

Typically, an effort of this size also requires one person to be designated as being the master planner as well, in addition to any lower-level responsibilities.

Every Tuesday at 3:30 the department gathers for doughnuts in the lounge. The Tuesday Tea Czar does NOT provide these doughnuts (perhaps excepting the first day of the semester). The Czar merely wrangles OTHERS to do it and emails them the day before to remind them to do it. One lucky student per semester gets this cushy job.

Each week, we meet to hear about what the other grad students and postdocs in the department are doing. The idea is to promote grad student/postdoc communication, so we schedule one grad student and one postdoc talk each week. This job involves reserving 544 for each semester (and look ahead to make sure profs aren't scheduling classes during that period in the future!), signing up people to give talks, sending reminder e-mails to the presenters and to students and postdocs at astro, maintaining the web page with the talk schedule, and running the talks. In the fall semester, we hold an intro meeting where everyone can introduce themselves (especially those new to the department), preferably with snacks, and have everyone sign up for talks. (Try to get the email addresses of new postdocs to contact them as well, because they often have just arrived and aren't on the postdocs list yet but are interested in giving talks.) People sometimes like to go out for beer afterwards as well. (And you can invite undergrads to the seminars as well, if there's interest.) Please see the GSPS web page for more description/motivation of the seminar series.

Campus committee dealing with issues surrounding the replacement building for Campbell Hall.

The Graduate Assembly is the arm of the student government specifically dedicated to graduate students. It receives graduate student fees and distributes them to various worthy projects around campus, including providing money for graduate students to attend conferences. The undergraduate student body, ASUC, technically represents graduate students as well, but is dominated by undergraduates (and, historically speaking, petty party politics and bickering). If you're used to ineffectual student government, the GA may surprise you. To be the GA rep, you must serve on a GA or campus committee, such as the Campbell Hall Replacement Committee (so whoever holds this job might want that one, too, since they have to serve on a committee, anyway). Committee time requirements can be as low as a few hours per month. The GA meets once a month for 2-4 hours and provides food. Your main duties will be to attend the GA and committee meetings and keep the other grad students apprised of goings on. Astronomy is allowed one GA delegate as well as an alternate, who must also be a committee member (and can only vote if the delegate is not present).

Educate! Agitate! Organize!

The United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 2865 is the union representing over 12,000 Academic Student Employees - Tutors, Readers, and Teaching Assistants - at the nine teaching campuses of the University of California. As for all employees, wages, benefits, workload, grievance procedures, and fair hiring processes are important issues of concern for graduate and undergraduate students working at the UC. Through the Union, we have the right to bargain with the UC over our working conditions and to have a say in the policies that affect us.

The Berkeley unit of AGSE represents the larger number of students in the UC system and it is part of the UAW Local 2865. The AGSE/UAW Berkeley meets once a month for ~2 hours and usually the topics are contract enforcement and outreach updates. Sometimes the job is more exciting like awakening consciences of regular citizens about an specific proposition (i.e. trying to reduce the budget for education; attacks on human rights like sweatshops or criminalization of 5 year old kids or some other nonsense propositions supported by some pathological politicians… ).

The meetings are held in the UAW 2865 Berkeley office at 2372 Ellsworth Street. Time requirements can be as low as a few hours per month. Your main duties will be to attend the meetings and keep the other grad students appraised of goings on. The annual meeting to discuss the strategies to reinforce the contract to pursue quality education is very instructive and fun. Someday all humans will have universal and free quality education.

The Mentor Master oversees the mentor system; look at that page or the detailed list of duties for more details. This job should be passed on in June rather than August. In late June/early July, the Mentor Master asks students to volunteer to act as mentors to incoming students, then (with input from the previous year's prospective hosting committee) pairs volunteer mentors with mentees. The Mentor Master holds a mentor/mentee kickoff lunch for incoming students the day before the Graduate Division's orientation, and a similar lunch for second-year students a few weeks into the school-year. Through the rest of the year, the Mentor Master's responsibility is to keep track of significant events in first- and second-year's schedules (e.g. upcoming 201 midterm, choosing next semester's classes), and send appropriately-timed reminders to the mentors to make arrangements to meet with their mentees. The Mentor Master checks in with mentees at the end of each semester to make sure the pairing is working, and also acts as back-up mentor if a mentee needs “menting” and their mentor is unavailable.

The de facto job of the public liaisons is two-fold. Firstly, the liaisons are contacted by whoever staffs the front desk of the department whenever a visitor calls (in person, by phone, or through e-mail) and asks to speak to an astronomer. This includes the media, grade school students, meteorite finders, curious callers from Sweden and, best of all, lunatics. The liaisons are given total authority to deal with these callers as the liaisons see fit. The second task is to handle any requests from the small percent of faculty who know about the liaison position. Some of our more visible faculty get more requests for interviews, class projects, and talks than they care to address, and some of these faculty will e-mail the liaisons to deal with these concerns. These can be dealt with by anything from a short phone conversation to an annual half-day field trip for a horde of 5^th graders.

Every year, UCB Astronomy hosts a camping trip designed to “encourage collaboration and networking within the astronomy community in California.” As cliched as the wording is (designed specifically to get the funding), it definitely strikes a chord: building a network and community of other left coast astronomers by enjoying the fun and beauty surrounding us.

Many many years ago, this job involved soliciting topics of interest from the astronomical community at large, wrangling speakers from the various California universities and arranging their travel, room, and board, designing the speaking schedule, organizing publicity, reserving rooms, providing for projectors, transportation, name tags, and inter-talk food, and taking care of any other little things that might come up when organizing a conference. In its current iteration, it is organizing a camping trip and inviting people from California schools for a more informal bonding experience.

Sierra Conference is a job that takes little effort for most of the year, then intense effort leading up to the event. Traditionally held in the summer, the Sierra Conference has found a semi-permanent placing just before the start of classes, so that first years might enjoy the event. This event works best if placed in a convenient geographic location for both northern and southern California schools, and has better success recruiting other schools to join if it is.

Each fall the department has a picnic. It involves grilling some food, lawn games, tug of war and just hanging around outside with colleagues, friends and family. The last few years its been at a picnic spot in Tilden near the Little Farm sometime around the end of September or beginning of October. The tasks involved are:

• badgering people into attending

• collecting money from people who will attend

• buying supplies (water, soft drinks, burgers, chips, cookies, charcoal, condiments, ice, etc)

• assembling the lawn games (in 2005 we purchased boccie and croquet for the department)

• coming up with new ideas for activities (water balloon toss has become quite popular)

• possibly getting prizes to hand out for people who win the activities

• staking out the picnic site the morning of the picnic

• running the grill

• getting tug-of-war rolling

• cleaning up

The department ski trip is an annual weekend-excursion usually held in January, February or March. The destination usually alternates between North and South Lake Tahoe. The primary activities are downhill skiing and snowboarding; some people often go cross-country skiing or snowshoeing as well. The responsibilities of the organizers are:

• select a weekend (taking input from the department)
• reserve cabins (usually 2 near to each other) for Friday and Saturday nights (Thursday as well, if there's interest) (for two nights, this can usually be done for ~$50 per person)
• look into discounted lift tickets (e.g. Albertson's, REI)
• plan (or delegate planning) meals: cooked dinners on Friday and Saturday nights, and food for people to make their own breakfasts and lunches on Saturday and Sunday
• buy (or delegate buying) the food
• look into subsidy from the department (talk to the Chair and to Sue Wells); usually $500, which can cover the food
• organize rides

The cosmic gardener is in charge of the rooftop garden. The primary responsibility is watering the plants every few days. Watering only takes ten minutes, but since it happens multiple times a week, the job is actually quite time-consuming. Longer-term responsibilities include occasional feeding and pruning of plants, and maybe someday harvesting a lemon. For information on garden history and care of individual plants, visit the ”the cosmic garden” page. The gardener should have easy access to the roof; knowledge about what makes plants happy is a plus.

SWPS (Society for Women in the Physical Sciences) is a resource for Berkeley graduate and undergraduate students in the physical sciences (physics, astronomy, geology, planetary science, and related fields). The goal is to create a friendly and supportive environment in these departments for all students and to particularly encourage women and minorities. SWPS offers workshops, networking opportunities, social activities, outreach projects, and “survival guides” for undergraduate majors.

SWPS Rep serves as one of the three SWPS coordinators, who oversee the many activities that SWPS participates in, including their mentoring program, community outreach programs, and large social events. As one of the coordinators, you are responsible for attending all SWPS-sponsored events (barring extenuating circumstances), and helping to plan the future of the organization. This job has a large time commitment, of approximately 5 hours per week.

Due to the large time commitment, SWPS is a paid position, with the coordinator receiving $200 per month stipend. Also, as it takes a large amount of effort, this job is optional. Meaning that if you want to take it, you can and it will count as a student job, but if no one wants to take it, it will not be forced upon someone.

For more information, see the SWPS webpage.

The faculty representative runs the grad student jobs meeting, attends faculty meetings (except closed meetings), and brings to the faculty any student concerns that come up. Here is a to do list for the jobs meeting:

• Get a list of the students who have offices in the department from Sandy. Some people (particularly physics students) may not be on the “students” mailing list. To check, you can look at /adm/users/mail.students which contains all of the e-mail addresses on the list. Physics students are not exempt from jobs.
• Make sure the meeting is at a time that the first-years can make. Invariably, a few older students won't be able to make it (you should ask for their job preferences in advance), but it's important that the first years are there to hear about the jobs, get introduced to the students, etc.
• Start the meeting with introductions around the room for the benefit of the first-years: name, year, adviser, etc.
• In the past, the first week of the semester (Mon-Wed, before Thurs tea) has been the best time. If you can get people together in advance, more power to you. If it's close to Thurs, you might want to give the second-years an advance reminder about tea.
• Ask the department chair if he wants to give a short welcome/announcements speech.
• Ask the department chair if any changes to the jobs are necessary. Getting people to do more after they've already been assigned jobs is difficult.
• When you send an e-mail to schedule the meeting, it's a good idea to include a list of jobs and their current holders for people's reference, as well as a link to the Wiki. Also, you can ask if any students think the list should be changed.
• During the meeting, it's worked well to have the previous job holder describe the job that's up for consideration.
• It's nice to bring food. In the past, reimbursement was possible.
• Once you have a final jobs list, send it to “everyone.”

The Undergraduate Liaison acts as an advisor and mentor to the undergraduate astronomy majors, especially in helping them get involved with and complete research projects and apply to grad school. Throughout the year, the Undergraduate Liaison should visit the undergrad lab, make a concerted effort to get to know the majors, and update and maintain the Astronomy Undergraduate Research Resources (AURR) webpage. A rough calendar of other major duties follows:

• Late August: Congratulations, you've just scored this position at the grad student jobs meeting! The first things you need to do are send an email to astromajors@astro.berkeley.edu introducing yourself, visit the undergrad lab to meet students, and sign up for the Office of Undergraduate Research newsletter here. This ~monthly newsletter will keep you informed of research info sessions and research program due dates, which you can pass on directly to the majors or use to update the AURR page.

• September: Email and/or hang up signs to remind the majors of the requirements to graduate with honors in astrophysics (see the bottom of the AURR Courses page) and to sign up for units of H195. Email or talk to faculty to let them know of these requirements, too, for any undergraduates they are advising.

• Early/Mid October: Hold an “Applying to Grad School” night for the majors. Get 3-4 first or second year grad students to serve as panelists, and start a discussion about the General GRE, Physics GRE, letters of rec, the essay, where to apply, etc. Distribute copies of practice Physics GREs, which you can get from the previous Undergraduate Liaison. Order pizzas for this event; the department will reimburse you.

• December: With Dexter Stewart, organize and hold an “Applying for REUs” night for the majors. Bring in majors who have already done an REU or other research project to talk about their experiences. Point the students to the AURR webpage to find information about REUs and other research opportunities.

• Early March: Contact Claudia Trujillo in physics (trujillo@physics.berkeley.edu) to coordinate the Physics and Astronomy Undergraduate Poster Session. Most of the work is done on their end, but it's good to touch base with them. Meet with the Astronomy Department chairman to confirm the amount of the Astronomy Department Poster Prize (in the past it's been $200). Email astromajors@astro.berkeley.edu to advertise the Poster Session and Poster Prize and encourage them to sign up.

• April: Poster Session is held in LeConte. Advertise with signs or email to get the department to attend the event and support our majors. Ask 2-3 grad students or postdocs to serve as judges and decide which astronomy student wins the poster prize. Notify Dexter and Sue of the poster prize winner, so they can print out a certificate and cut the check.

• April: Email faculty@astro.berkeley.edu to rally professors to advertise for undergraduate researchers on the AURR Research with Berkeley Professors page. Once the page has been updated, send an email to astromajors@astro.berkeley.edu to let them know the positions are available.

• May: Ask the Astronomy Department chairman to include the Astronomy Poster Prize in the announcement of all prizes at the last colloquium.

• May: Help Astronomy Department chairman organize a “send-off” in the lounge for graduating students and their families, to be held the morning or afternoon of graduation.

• August: Participate in a panel at Launch Day to inform incoming and transfer students of research opportunities available to them.

The webmaster is responsible for:

• Dealing with email to webmaster@astro.berkeley.edu
• Being the student contact for any work on http://astro.berkeley.edu that needs to be done
• Overseeing the operation of the BADGrads wiki and its server. See the page on wiki administration.
• Being a student representative on the Computer Committee. (This could be split out into a separate job but the Computer Committee is a relatively light duty and the overlap of interest is likely to be high.)

It should only take one student to fulfill the duties of webmaster. The main prerequisite is a general knowledge of computers and networking; knowing how servers work and are maintained is more important than knowing how to actually create a website.