First and foremost, CONGRATULATIONS!!! You’ve made it through what was likely a far from conventional final semester and are about to start your journey at UC BERKELEY. Though, as the saying goes, out of the frying pan and into the fire. Your first semester here, you will likely meet challenges you’ve never faced before. Not to mention the problem posed by a nontraditional academic setting that many students at Cal haven’t completely adjusted to. That being said, the most important message we want you to take from this, is that you don’t have to face it alone. We implore you to find a community that will support you and help you bare the weight of these challenges. Whether that community be Seismic or otherwise, our number one priority is to make sure you feel like you have a place on campus, though we would be honored and thrilled to have you as a part of our community. We pride ourselves on being a home away from home for our members. A place where everyone will feel welcome. Somewhere to escape to. We strive to help each other and build this community up.

Speaking of building things up, the icing on the cake of this team is what our name actually stands for. In Seismic Design, we work from the beginning of fall until early March to create a five foot tall balsa wood tower capable of withstanding significant ground motion testing. To accomplish this, we spend a lot of time split into our three main branches: Design, Analysis, and Construction. The combined efforts of these groups allow us to test and improve upon multiple models to perform well at our annual competition. Spending a lot of time together working on this project naturally results in the team getting closer over time, but we make sure that not all our time is spent working on the project. Socials are probably one of the best ways for anyone to bond with the team outside of traditional hours. These vary in style depending on what the interests of the team are, but there is always the bonus of food typically being involved. Outside of socials, we also have intramural sports teams that anyone can join (though this may not be the case next semester given the circumstances).

Given this is only a brief description of what we do here, you may be beginning to feel like this may be a lot of extra work. The honest truth of this is that it is only as much work as you want to put in. We understand that everyone in our team is a student and we never want to overburden them or make them feel like they’re sacrificing for the project. As I said before, we want to be a home away from home for you, so as far as we’re concerned your mental and physical health will always come first and we will help you as much as you want us to.

We wish you the best on your journey here and hope that you’ll let us be a little part of that by joining our Seismic family.

Tentative Timeline of Events

• Join the Team

  Joining the team automatically signs you up to our mailing list, which will be used within the first few weeks of the Fall 2023 semester to inform interested students of the upcoming events for Seismic. It’s absolutely normal to join multiple student organizations and select the one that best suits your interests at a later time. So if you have even the slightest interest in structural & earthquake engineering, we highly encourage you to join our team.

  JOIN THE TEAM

• Team Info-sessions

  Time and Location TBD

  In the first team info-session, we will tell you more about our team and answer all of your questions: what we do exactly, when we meet, how will we continue now that everything’s online, and more. Any and all logistical questions will be answered in this session.

  We will take this time to introduce our officer board and get you more familiarized with the people you may be working with for different modules in Seismic. This session will also go further into explaining the goals of the modules (design, analysis, construction), how the three branches work together, and what an everyday experience is like for each branch.

• Everything After

  Everything after the Info Session happens organically. We will slowly teach you everything you need to know to succeed in the team — along with tips & tricks on surviving Cal 🙂

In the meantime…