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With so much brilliance at UC Berkeley — from headline-grabbing research to stellar faculty members across disciplines — it’s impossible for undergraduates, many scouting for their academic passions, to sample it all while on campus.

Some 1,000 students participated in Saturday’s event; Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna was the keynote speaker.

Jade Amor-Shannan Johnson and Cerenity Bush stood under the bright winter sun on Saturday, proudly waiting to process into UC Berkeley’s Haas Pavilion and wearing personalized caps bedecked in glitter, illustrations and motivating phrases.

Johnson’s cap said, “The marathon continues,” and Bush’s quoted Maya Angelou: “Success is loving life and daring to live it.”

For the first time, the campus is using mass timber — a lighter, safer and more energy-efficient alternative to traditional concrete and steel construction — in construction.

The Dwinelle Annex will undergo interior and exterior architectural updates to make it accessible for DSP’s diverse community of students.

For the first time in its over 50-year history, UC Berkeley’s Disabled Students’ Program (DSP) will have its own building, a campus investment that will centralize DSP staff and services, expand its facilities and make them more accessible, and improve support for the program’s community of 5,000 students.   

Some 60 languages are taught on campus, and revitalizing and preserving endangered languages is a priority.

At least 60 languages — from Mongolian and Old Norse to Polish, Catalan, Ancient Egyptian, Arabic and Biblical Hebrew — are taught at UC Berkeley, one of the nation’s top institutions for the breadth and depth of its world languages program. A growing emphasis also is being placed at Berkeley on revitalizing and preserving endangered languages, most of them spoken by Indigenous peoples.