Last Updated: August 20, 2022

<aside> 🚀 Currently being updated by Alicia, president of Launchpad. Reach out if you’d like to have any info edited!

</aside>

When I came to Cal, one of the things that excited me the most was the myriad of cool things I could do because there were just so many things going on on campus. Even looking just at Berkeley tech clubs specifically, there are a ton, but the large and decentralized nature of our school makes it difficult to keep abreast with everything going on and the information can be pretty overwhelming at times.

This guide hopes to address this by giving you a high-level, consolidated overview of the different tech clubs on campus and help you figure out what you might be interested in.

• Quick Notes

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More Opportunities

• Berkeley Cyber Security Team Berke1337
• Convergent at Berkeley
• EnableTech
• Pioneers in Engineering
• ecode at Berkeley
• Extended Reality at Berkeley
• Fintech at Berkeley
• Invention Corps
• Neurotechnology at Berkeley
• PCS at Berkeley
• PlexTech
• Robotics at Berkeley
• Space Technologies at Cal
• Space Enterprise at Berkeley (SEB)
• UrsaTech Berkeley

… and Berkeley also has a number of consulting student clubs on campus with a tech focus:

• VCG (Valley Consulting Group)
• VSS (Venture Strategy Solutions)
• DiversaTech

CS Communities

• CS Scholars is a program meant to enable CS students from under-resourced and low opportunity communities
• SWE (Society of Women Engineers)
• AWE (Association of Women in EE&CS)
• FEMTech Berkeley
• CS Kickstart is a 1-week program for incoming freshman girls, where they learn python, go to different tech companies, and get exposed to tech careers.
• CSUA (Computer Science Undergraduate Association)
• UPE (Upsilon Pi Epsilon) ****and HKN (Eta Kappa Nu) are the L&S Computer Science and EECS Honors Societies respectively. You get invited to join these Computer Science clubs if you meet a certain GPA requirement, and you go through a semester-long process where you have to meet certain requirements and attend certain events before you’re officially a member of these societies.
• The UC Berkeley IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) aims to promote professional awareness, encourage academic growth, and organize social activities within the EECS community.

Other Opportunities

• Accel Scholars is a mentorship program that empowers undergraduate engineering and computer science students at UC Berkeley through unparalleled access to Silicon Valley, personalized mentorship, and industry-relevant curriculum. Read more here.
• Berkeley has a ton of great research opportunities. This article won’t go into detail on this because research is a whole other beast but to my knowledge, they’re all fairly competitive, especially for undergraduates.
• The ASUC has an Office of the CTO (OCTO). You can find out more about them here.
• Berkeleytime is built and maintained by a team of developers, designers, and product managers. Find out how to join them here.
• The SCET (Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology) has various (paid and unpaid) opportunities for students to get involved. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to find a place that lists these opportunities in a consolidated manner, but this is 1 such example.
• Tangentially related is the entrepreneurship ecosystem here at Cal, and a great resource for this is this guide (which is also an inspiration for this article)
• Also tangentially related is the design community here at Cal, and a great resource to navigate those resources is this guide
• CITRIS is a center of information technology at the interest of society. The center consists of research (tech policy, women in tech), student discoveries programs (tech for social good), and accelerator for startups that are addressing societal challenges. Read more here.
• Besides the usual CS classes, there’re also a bunch of DeCals on some really cool subjects. You can check out their website for the complete list, but some of my favorites are the Web Design Decal, the React Decal, and the Ruby on Rails Decal.

The tech/Computer Science club culture at Cal is not without its accessibility issues. But in many ways, that’s a fact of life at a large public school like Berkeley where the number of students far outweigh the number of opportunities/resources.

I hope this guide has been useful in giving you a high-level picture of the different tech student organizations at Berkeley (and what they do)! Feel free to leave a comment below if you have any questions/spot any mistakes and you can always reach me through email!

*Thank you for reading this! If you enjoyed it or found it useful, please give the original Medium article* 50** 👏🏽'**s and share it with your friends so more people can get to it!

Special thanks to Thu Nguyen, the ANova Officer board, the Codeology team, Emily Zhong, Olivia Shiah, Divi Schmidt, Angela Dong, and Daniel Jing for their input on ANova, Codeology, Cal Hacks, Codebase, Launchpad, Blockchain at Berkeley, and Machine Learning at Berkeley respectively