How our team saved Big Data at Berkeley’s club culture from the virtual void
By Smruthi Balajee and Melissa Wong
How it Began
After spending almost seven (!!) months in quarantine, you have all probably experienced that highly dreaded, extremely painful, silently lingering awkwardness that seems to define most of 2020’s virtual interactions. If you haven’t, firstly — we’re jealous, and secondly — fear not, we shall paint you a vivid picture of the feeling. It’s 6:08pm and you are still in bed, almost late for your meeting (even with Berkeley Time)! You quickly hop onto the Zoom call from your phone, scrambling to mute yourself and turn off your camera before you — god forbid — are seen by another living soul. You are a mere two minutes early to the call, but even those 120 long seconds of tense silence are almost too much to bear. The rest of the meeting isn’t much better, filled with halted transitions and dead breakout rooms. Worst of all, despite working with your virtual peers for months, you can’t seem to remember what they look like beyond the awful default black square that clouds your vision and haunts your memories. Does this depiction sound like an exaggeration? Trust us, it’s not.
As the self-proclaimed ~guardians~ of Big Data at Berkeley’s ~vibe~ we knew that we could not let our club interactions devolve into the monotonous, detached, and frankly stressful scene that was pictured above. That’s why our executive board got together and brainstormed effective ways to foster a supportive and positive club environment even while thousands of miles apart.
Protecting Big Data’s open, friendly, and growth-oriented club culture from the virtual void has not been easy. We have had to battle quarantine apathy (sometimes living in bed is the only option, ya feel?), overcome technical difficulties, and bring people from all corners of the world together. It was a tall order, but after 7 long months spent honing our organization’s virtual experience, we think we have created something special. Below, we have documented the four goals that we tried to uphold when envisioning a new virtual reality for Big Data at Berkeley. These goals are centered around staying connected, continuing to learn and grow, gaining hands-on experience with data, and celebrating each other!
Goal 1: Stay Connected
Let’s be real — when was the last time you went out of your way to contact a new acquaintance virtually? We personally are far too lazy to do that, and knew that we couldn’t reasonably expect our new members to stay in touch with each other regularly. That’s why we introduced several unique initiatives this summer that would encourage all of our members to get to know each other.
In this newly virtual world, “staying connected” has taken on a whole other level of importance and meaning. When quarantine hit and everyone started moving back home, we were no longer “connected” by the UC Berkeley campus. We felt the loss of small experiences that tied us all together, from meeting up at Moffitt and searching for an elusive fourth floor table, to chilling on the glade in between classes. Our newfound reality found us sequestered in our homes, thousands of miles apart, grasping for ways to stay in touch with the outside world. With the virtual setting quickly becoming permanent, our exec board realized that we needed to adapt and provide more creative ways for our members to grow the relationships they had just begun to create before we left for quarantine. That’s why we launched our Virtual Coffee Chat initiative this summer!
Our coffee chat program is streamlined, easy to use, and consistent, ensuring that our members never feel alone during this difficult time. To participate, members only need to take a couple of seconds out of their day to accept a Google calendar invite and click on a video meeting link! Taking inspiration from fun tools like “Lunch Ninja,” our Internal Vice President, Meg Khurana, handled everything from pairing members based on common meeting times and interests to creating a Google calendar invite with a unique video call link for every meeting. After having some enlightening conversations about gardening, the ongoing apocalypse, and anime, we are excited to call this initiative a success!
We also hosted a lot of socials throughout the summer, where we experimented with new multiplayer video games that encouraged us to work together and have fun! For a while Skribbl.io was our go-to game; however, we soon transitioned to games like Codenames, Zingers, zombies.io, and generals.io! Sometimes we would just chill and hang out virtually on Houseparty or Voiceplace. As long as we were laughing and having fun, it didn’t matter that we were thousands of miles apart.
After a summer filled with fun virtual activities, we realized that what connected us was not the UC Berkeley campus. It was our friendships, the conversations we had, and the memories we shared that made our club more tightly-knit than ever before!
Goal 2: Keep Learning
Here at Big Data we are driven individuals who have a passion for ~learning~. When everyone returned home mid-March, we knew that two of the biggest challenges our members would face were staying motivated and keeping busy. On that end, we decided to schedule a series of member-led workshops ranging from “How to Polish Your LinkedIn Profile”, to “Intro to Adobe Illustrator”, and “How to Make Your Dream Resume using Adobe InDesign!” We also wanted to explore some fun, quarantine-friendly interests through workshops like “Intro to GarageBand”, “Bake With Me!,” and “Zumba!!!” We scattered these professional and social workshops throughout the summer to ensure that our members would have multiple chances to learn more about something they had always been interested in, but never got the chance to try.
To highlight the value of learning in a more informal, casual setting, we also introduced member-led mini-presentations! This was a great opportunity for our members to teach us about their unique passions, as quarantine inevitably left us with some very interesting hobbies (minecraft, anyone?). For 15 minutes before each of our summer socials, they had the floor, free to tell us about anything. We always left these mini-presentations knowing a bit more about a random topic! For example, one of our project managers, Bella Yavari, gave us a quick tutorial on how to make her favorite healthy snacks! (Peanut butter on everything = y e s) Coco Sun, one of our instructors for the Big Data Bootcamp, taught us all about the importance of sleep and the effects it has on the human body. Fun fact for all the college students reading this: sleeping at 3am every day actually isn’t good for your body (who would have thought??)
And while we loved learning from each other, we also brought in a couple of ~professionals~ to speak about topics they were passionate about and wanted to share with the next generation of data scientists! Before the summer officially began, we had Dr. Stella Aslibekyan, a Genetic Epidemiologist at 23andMe, speak to our members and Big Data Bootcamp students about her career journey and how 23andMe uses data science for genetics research. Peter Nguyen, a data scientist at Chipotle, also hosted a tech talk for our members where he taught us how to use Facebook’s Prophet algorithm, a forecasting model that he claims he would be unemployed without!
Goal 3: Gain Hands-On Experience with Data
We know what some of you are thinking — how can anything that is virtual be ~hands-on~? To all the tough critics out there, we counter with this: how would you ~hold~ data?
For the first time in Big Data at Berkeley’s history, we worked on data analytics projects over the summer! By launching this initiative, we were able to create opportunities for members of both committees to work together and analyze real-world data sets. Not only did our teams discover key insights about relevant topics like COVID-19 and Police Violence, but they also grew stronger technically and gained important industry skills! This hands-on experience helped them discover more about the data science life cycle and take significant steps in their professional journeys.
The COVID-19 team, led by our Project Manager Bella Yavari, explored how COVID-19 has impacted small businesses and certain communities across the country. They released not one, but TWO articles about their findings. You can read them here and here.
The Police Violence team, led by our Project Manager Trisha Sanghal, explored how a city’s crime rates influence the enforcement of police policies in various cities throughout the U.S. Their work can give you some insights into the use of force restrictions being enforced/implemented across the country. Read their article here!
Goal 4: Celebrate Each Other!
Let’s be real here, who doesn’t love ~validation~? It’s always a great feeling to be appreciated for all of your hard work! Our Big Data community is so much stronger because we love uplifting and supporting our friends.
We launched our official Instagram account (@bigdata.berkeley) a few months ago, and one way we’ve been trying to celebrate each other and our accomplishments is through our weekly member spotlights! We select a random member each week to feature in our Sunday spotlight post, and share a bit about what they do in BDAB, why they love data science, and some of their hobbies. Check out some of our super cool member spotlights here!
Our Slack summer shoutout series also allowed members to celebrate anyone in the club who had truly gone above-and-beyond. By filling out a quick shoutout form, they could acknowledge the hard work (or even the new beard) of a friend in BDAB. In our wholesome “Shoutout Sunday” Slack posts, we were able to send out a wave of positivity!
Last semester we were abruptly sent home in the middle of March, long before our typical end-of-semester Big Data Banquet (thanks, COVID-19). This meant that we couldn’t celebrate the accomplishments of our members traditionally, with a formal dinner at a fancy restaurant. To make up for this, we had a virtual superlatives ceremony! After sending out a form where all of our members could suggest and vote on superlatives, we made certificates for each person and presented them all in a cute Zoom ceremony. Some of our personal favorite superlatives include: “Most likely to create a Rogue AI” and “Most likely to say ‘Yee Haw’ Unironically”!
Hopes for the Future
As we enter a completely virtual fall semester, we are so excited to continue all of the initiatives that we launched this summer, from our member-led workshops to our superlatives ceremony. Despite some inevitably awkward pre-meeting conversations on Zoom (that typically result in one of us rambling about an irrelevant topic) and the sheer distance between all of our members, we truly believe that our club culture of growth, inclusion, and positivity has grown stronger over quarantine. Our members have held deep conversations, learned cool facts, and picked up vital industry skills in just a few isolated months. We are proud to report that we ~guarded~ the ~vibe~ successfully and Big Data at Berkeley is closer than ever!
We are always on the lookout for new ways to adapt and grow, so if you have any ideas for mastering virtual interactions, let us know! If you end up trying any of the initiatives that we mentioned above, we would also love to hear your experiences and thoughts. :)
As always, follow Big Data at Berkeley on Medium and LinkedIn for some amazing Data Science content!
