By Megan Mansell Williams
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Photos By UC Berkeley office of public affairs
Carolyn Chee (B.S.’86, M.S.’88, Ph.D.’98 ME) is an engineer, wife, mother of four and now director of UC Berkeley’s Office of Graduate Services.
From the time she was a little girl, Carolyn Chee’s
(B.S.’86, M.S.’88, Ph.D.’98 ME) dream was to become an astronaut. Poor eyesight
prevented her from having that flight of fancy but not from having an exciting
career ride.
Stops included NASA and Boeing. She returned to Berkeley
Engineering for a Ph.D., then she was off to a startup for a spell. UC Berkeley
Extension came next and, finally, she reached a soft landing back at her
beloved alma mater. Last fall, Chee became director of Berkeley’s Graduate Services, a new office
that combines three formerly separate student stops—appointments, degrees and
fellowships.
During her years at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Chee
worked on space probes Magellan and Galileo, which she got to autograph before
they launched. So, although she herself has never been up there, her signature
is. “It’s kind of cool to know that my name is circling around some planet
other than Earth,” she says.
With her career in the cosmos denied due to earthly
limitations, Chee pursued her mechanical engineering Ph.D., modeling the fluid
dynamics of blood flow through the heart. Then she switched gears again and
accepted a job at a dot-com, where, she says, it was the bubble’s financial
incentives that “lured me to the dark side.”
Within a year, she decided that another occupation shake-up
was in order. A wife and mother at this point (she now has four kids under the
age of nine), she landed a slot at UC Berkeley Extension, overseeing
engineering and tech programs for adults, a position she says she enjoyed
immensely. But when the role of Graduate Services chief materialized, she
leapt.
The parallels between her current job and her days as an
engineer are surprisingly close, Chee says. It’s a lot like systems engineering:
Students come in with problems, a set of parameters, if you will, and she’s
there to help find solutions.
Coming back to the Berkeley
campus was, in a way, coming home. Chee grew up in Sacramento, one of four children. All of them
attended Cal,
as did their father, an engineer for Aerojet.
“I had such a positive experience at Cal,” she says. “Life is not just one area
of expertise, but it is about so much more. And Berkeley had so much to offer outside of
engineering. I want to give back to the community that made it so pleasant for
me.”
