The Camarones Community Coalition is hosting a bowling fundraiser on Saturday, May 12, 2012 from 3 pm until 5 pm at the Yerba Buena Ice Skating and Bowling Center (750 Folsom St., San Francisco- 3 blocks from Powell St. BART station).

Camarones, Ecuador is three hours from Quito in the Manabi province and is home to approximately 70 families, most of which are below the poverty line. The mission of CCC is to provide education opportunities for adults and children in the community. Their upcoming event seeks to raise funds to build a community center that will provide a location for town meetings, health services, environmental education programs, and activities for adults and children. Land for the community center has been donated by a family in Camarones.

This past Saturday, I rose early from sleep and donned my very best work clothes and boots in preparation to join eight of my fellow graduate students and two rangers in a morning event that could best be described as “trashy.” The rangers that joined us were representatives sent from the East Bay Regional Parks District. Together, the eleven of us spent three long hours in the warm morning sunshine recovering trash from the Emervyille Crescent Shoreline, which is a part of the Eastshore State Park network. This special shoreline cleanup event was organized by the new Community Outdoor Cleanup and Outreach (COCO) project, funded and sponsored by the Graduate Assembly (GA) of UC Berkeley.

The new COCO project is the culmination of a year’s worth of effort on the part of concerned graduate student Dillon Niederhut, the GA delegate from Anthropology, and the GA Community Outreach Workgroup that he was pivotal in founding. This cleanup was COCO’s trial event, largely organized by fellow Workgroup member Christopher Klein, the GA delegate from Astronomy.

The Postdoc Industry Exploration Program (PIEP) is hosting a workshop entitled “Informational Interviewing” on April 18, 2012 from 5:45-7:30 pm in 105 Stanley Hall. Vegetarian food and refreshments will be served during networking time from 5:45-6:15 and the workshop will be from 6:15-7:30. With plenty of food and drinks, the social time is excellent for meeting scientists in other fields and labs and getting everyone out their lab to have some fun. At a recent workshop on how to write effective biosketches, I was able to connect with several biologists and chemical engineers.

The information interviewing workshop will be conducted by Mark Friedfeld, Assistant Director and Career Advisor at Haas Business School. Mark specializes in financial services in his capacity as career adviser but works with students from a variety of other fields. On the philanthropic side, Mark is active member of the San Francisco Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.