I'm going to try to start making short blog posts on a (approximately?) weekly basis. They'll be about whatever, maybe my work, maybe games I've been playing, maybe just random topics I want to talk about. The main goal is to just to be writing something on a regular basis, so that when it comes to writing important things (i.e. papers) I might be more "in practice". Maybe no one reads them, but that's fine. Most people don't care about people e.g. watching them do practice runs before a marathon, but that practice still has value, so hopefully the same principle could apply here.
Today I'm gonna write about "Berkeley time" (which is not actually a Berkeley-specific phenomenon, but I think it's the most egregious here) and why it upsets me so much. Basically, at Berkeley if a class is scheduled to start at e.g. 1:00, the professor won't actually start lecturing until 1:10. The reason this is the standard (or at least, what I hope is the reason) is because class times at Berkeley all start at XX:00 or XX:30, and class lengths are all multiples of half hours, so it's not uncommon that a student will have a class ending at 2:30 and another starting at 2:30, on opposite sides of campus. The 10 minute delay gives this student time to run across campus and be there for the entirety of both lectures. Again, this isn't unique to Berkeley, I know of other schools that have their own variants.
Before I talk about the easy, obvious fix for this, let me talk about the many many reasons why I find it so annoying.
Unclear what it applies to
So for lectures, Berkeley time always applies. But, lectures are not the only things happening on a college campus. I attend talks, meet with professors and other students, go to reading groups, go to trainings, go to club meetings, and do many more things. This is as a grad student, the position on the academic totem pole which I think would have the least hard commitments in our schedule (because ideally, most of our time is being spent on research). For undergraduates and professors with much more packed schedules, there are probably many other commitments they have.
Does Berkeley time apply to these other events? I think the subset of these events where it was clarified if we'd start 10 minutes late was a minority, but it wasn't the case that a minority started at the stated time instead of Berkeley time. Without clarification, the time spent on these events is much less useful: If half the people attending something think it starts on Berkeley time and the other half don't, then either the latter half waste 10 minutes waiting for the former, or the former miss out on 10 minutes of this event (both have happened to me).
Inconsistent with other, off-campus events
Now, for on-campus events like the ones I mentioned before, it might be arguable that they should all start 10 minutes late, in case anyone has a class right before these events that would like to attend these events. But, these aren't the only events in our lives. For example, Berkeley has a great resource called the Simons Institute, where researchers working in various areas of CS theory come from all over the world to spend a semester collaborating and sharing their research. There are many great talks that I as a CS theory student would like to attend, but these don't start on Berkeley time (well, usually they don't but sometimes they do and it's not always announced whether they do or not: see previous point) because the majority of people at Simons are not Berkeley-affiliated. So now, if I have class that ends right before a talk at Simons, I'm inevitably going to be late (as opposed to the obvious fix mentioned below, which would give me time to make it to the Simons event).
I also have collaborators from other universities who I'd like to meet with via video chat, and we usually set our meeting times to XX:00 or XX:30 like normal people do. But, this means sometimes I'll be late to these meetings because the Berkeley event schedule assumes it's okay to show up 10 minutes late to an event starting on the hour (or because I'm just wired to show up to everything 10 minutes late: see next point). Oh, and it gets fun when the other campus has its own starting time standard that isn't 10 minutes late (I've seen 3, 5, and 7 mentioned as how many minutes late everything starts on some campuses).
And even for non-work reasons, there are even just events in the town of Berkeley which don't operate on Berkeley time, which means sometimes one needs to rush to them from one's on-campus events or just can't schedule them at a time it seems like one should be able to. Both "important" things like doctor's/dentist's appointments, and more fun things like pub trivia when you need to claim a table.
Sets a bad standard
So before being at Berkeley when I had to show up to things on normal-person time, I usually made it a point to try to be 5 minutes early to events in my schedule, and ashamed to be 1-2 minutes late. Now, I find myself cutting it close more often, and not minding being 5 minutes late so much. Maybe this is just a personal thing, maybe I'm just biased in my perceptions of when I showed up to events before/after coming to Berkeley, but regardless I do feel like the standard of Berkeley time does affect my (and maybe others) tendency to show up to things on time. I also don't think it helps that no one ever officially explained this to me, I just kind of caught on after my first few classes that this was happening. I won't dwell on this one too much, but I don't like that there is an aspect of our campus culture that implicitly is okay with showing up "late" to things.
There's an obvious and easy-to-implement fix
Everything could just start on time and officially end 10 minutes earlier. A 1:00-2:00 event could just run officially from 1:00 to 1:50, instead of officially from 1:00 to 2:00 and unofficially at 1:10 to 2:00.
That's it. An announcement that this is the new standard is literally all that needs to happen to get rid of all the issues with Berkeley time, while allowing people the same amount of time to get between classes and other commitments. The best part is, classes still "officially" start at 2:00 instead of 2:10 in the course registration system, in schedules published online, etc. So it's not like we're officially changing the start time of anything, and if anything updating all publicly listed event times is only being more honest. The only downside is, people have to shift their sleep schedule 10 minutes earlier, but I hardly think that's an issue. It's not like I'm advocating for a revolution of the campus schedule, because under this change it's really not changing at all relative to itself, and it's better aligning with the rest of the world.
I've thought about this a fair amount and can't think of any reason why someone in the administration shouldn't just snap their fingers and make this fairly small change happen (besides, well, the usual gripes people have with campus administrations), and that's really what frustrates me most of all about Berkeley time.
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