NOVUM: A New Look At Yourself, Society, and the World

On Thursday, April 26, UC Berkeley’s renowned business group, Phi Beta Lambda (PBL), presented the event Novum: A New look at Yourself, Society, and the World. This event, consisting of five professor speakers and three performance groups, is a celebration of knowledge and urges students and participants to ponder upon the world beyond our world of lectures, notes, and tests, to observe the world in new ways. As noted in the promotional blog post of the event, highly-rated professors were chosen as speakers, and PBL president William Yan said, “From each talk, we want the attendees to have a key takeaway and change the way they see the world around them.”

The five professors who spoke each hailed from different disciplines, including philosophy, biology, history, business, and chemistry. One may envision professors as dry, croaky-voiced, out-of-touch intellectuals who only befuddle students more than necessary during sleep-inducing lectures. Well, they should be proven wrong. Professors at Berkeley are some of the brightest instructors in the country, and their passion for teaching is a gift to students. They are teaching because they are moved to share profound knowledge with others, which is in turn a selfless act that institutions, students, and individuals should recognize and honor. Here were the five professors who spoke:

Hubert Dreyfus

A world famous philosopher, Professor Dreyfus earned three degrees in philosophy from Harvard University. His main interests include phenomenology, existentialism and the philosophy of both psychology and literature, as well as the philosophical implications of artificial intelligence. Dreyfus has written several books and published many papers, becoming one of the most well known modern American philosophers today. After teaching at several universities such as the University of Frankfurt and MIT, Dreyfus has settled at UC Berkeley and has been teaching here for over 40 years.

George Roderick

 
Professor George Roderick earned his PhD in Biology at Dartmouth University for his research on invasive species. His current interests include the biology and genetics of biological invasions as well as the history and structure of populations. Having traveled extensively to many diverse ecological and biologically diverse environments, Dr. Roderick is an expert on invasive species as well as the trophic interactions affecting an organism’s ability to colonize novel environments. Currently, he is examining the relationship between varying insects including alpine butterflies and their environments.

David Wetzel

 
Professor Wetzel currently teaches in the history department of UC Berkeley, including courses on Europe and the world wars as well as international relations. David earned his bachelors at the University of Pennsylvania and a PhD from the University of Chicago, and is currently writing a book titled “A Duel of Nations” which will carry the story of the Franco-Prussian War’s diplomacy down to the signing of the Treaty of Frankfurt on May 10, 1871.

Frank Schultz

 
Frank Schultz is a lecturer of strategy at the Haas School of Business. After obtaining his PhD in strategic management from the University of Minnesota, Professor Schultz has written several papers and began teaching at Haas in 2005. Since then, he has won many awards in teaching including the Earl F. Cheit Award for Excellence. Professor Schultz’s interests lie in expertise and deliberate practice, as well as strategic leadership and decision making.

Timothy Mattson

 
Tim Mattson earned a PhD. in Chemistry for his work on quantum molecular scattering. This was followed by a Post-doc at Caltech where he ported his molecular scattering software to the Caltech/JPL hypercubes. Since then, he has held a number of commercial and academic positions with computational science on high performance computers as the common thread. Currently, he is working in Intel’s Computational Software Laboratory. His goal is to develop technologies that will make parallel computing more accessible to the general programmer.

In addition to the five speakers, three performance groups, Velociraptors, Golden Overtones, and Movement, wowed the crowd, respectively, with their rapid choreography, harmonizing vocals, and deft footwork.

It was a wonderful evening of speakers who really cared to pass on their wisdom to the knowledge-hungry students. Oftentimes, in our lives, we go on our ways and take courses that we plan to pave the way to declaring our intended majors, or write a paper that we hope will impress our professors and give us boosts in our GPA. However, life sometimes decides to change its course and take you down the unexpected path. As Professor Dreyfus says, “You can’t plan a vocation or a career as much as you can plan falling in love.”