Living and Learning at Berkeley

Housing and Residential Life
You have a wide variety of housing choices at Berkeley.  The campus guarantees housing to new students who are admitted to the fall semester and meet the housing application deadline.  Most residence halls offer dining facilities, seminar/study rooms and on-site academic services such as tutoring, advising, and computing assitance.  In addition, the campus maintains over 1,000 apartments for students who are married, single parents, or domestic partners.  Also available are "theme houses" that combine residential living with a particular academic focus and nearly 3,500 spaces in student cooperatives, fraternities, and sororities.  For more information, please check the links on the right side of this page.

Over 700 Campus Organizations
The Berkeley campus is an eclectic, interesting and varied place to live and to learn, and this is truly reflected in the wide range of clubs and student organizations available. Cal students can join the Marching Band, the Cal Hang Gliding Club, radio station KALX, ethnic associations, humor and literary magazines, debate team, and a variety of cultural and political groups.  If you can't find one that suits your interests, you may even form your own organization—new groups are constantly forming and changing to meet the needs of the our students.

Volunteer and Internship Opportunities
A large percentage of our students take Berkeley's public service mission to heart. Cal Corps Public Service Center coordinates a wide variety of programs for students who want to volunteer for a community organization, work with an established campus group such as Cal Berkeley Habitat for Humanity or Raza Recruitment and Retention Center, or pursue internship opportunities to supplement their classroom experience. The Berkeley Career Center is another excellent resource for internships, both in the corporate and nonprofit arenas.

Arts and Cultural Events
As a Cal student, you can take advantage of an exciting variety of on-campus lectures, concerts, forums, seminars, festivals, plays, exhibits, and films offered by world-acclaimed scholars and performers—so many that you need to check the calendar of events to keep up.  In addition, a host of arts, entertainment and sports activities are within minutes from campus in San Francisco, Oakland and other surrounding Bay Area communities.  Downtown Berkeley, a short walk from campus, offers four movie theaters (22 screens), highly-regarded theater, live music, artist cooperatives, and many other cultural venues.

Cal Bear Athletics  
Berkeley is a member of the PAC-10 Division I Conference and offers a full range of men's and women's intercollegiate sports.  You can watch the Cal Bears fight it out on the football field, tennis court or track, or take advantage of the campus' extensive sports and recreational facilities yourself.  Cal has a comprehensive intramural sports program, offering everything from coed flag football to martial arts.