Projects & Events
Weekly General Meetings
Exclusive Mentorship and Speakers
Toppa’s tie with Google allows us to invite mentors across different fields from Google to share their career stories and train us on skills essential to advancing our careers. Past topics include personal branding, networking, digital presence etc. At the end of each session, we offer plenty of time for our members to network with these mentors. Our mentorship sessions helped us in understanding more about different types of careers, and learning soft skills essential to climbing the ladder.
Past mentors include:
Joe He, Product Manager @ YouTube,
Chris Trinh, Program Manager for Google Scholarship Programs,
Jerry Lee, the Youngest Senior Strategy & Operations Manager @ Google,
Raphael Tse, Business Operations & Strategy Principal @ Google,
Mona Weng, Global Head, Waze for Broadcasters @ Google,
Jack He, Senior Software Engineer @ Google,
Derek Lei, Director of Product Management @ DCG Digital Ventures, Former SWE @ Google,
Christopher M. Jones, Director at CoolClimate Network, UC Berkeley,
Nabeil Kizilbash, Data Scientist @ Facebook
Thanks again for all the mentors and speakers who come to Toppa!
Project Groups
Diverse Projects, excel in multidisciplinary fields
At Toppa, we encourage initiatives. Starting in Fall 2020 semester, each of our selected project directors would lead their own project, offering our members the opportunity to put their hard and soft skills into practice. These projects cover a variety of fields, including consulting, SWE, marketing, Fintech, and more. More details of the projects would be released in our info sessions.
Current Projects - Spring 2022
GameDev Studio
Led by Edison Chen
In today’s world, games are becoming more and more relevant to our everyday lives. Traditional games on computers and consoles are getting published year by year, mobile games have been dominating the younger generation’s minds, and tech companies are investing in Metaverse, a new form of experience similar to games. This project introduces members to the world of game development, an exciting intersection between technology, art, and entertainment, and prepares them for teamwork and industry experience. In a timeline of 8 to 9 weeks, members will be led through the entire iteration of developing a video game with Unity, including the Minimum Viable Product (MVP), Alpha and Beta testing, and final release. Our final product will be the game itself, published through the online platform itch.io and available for all to play.
NoteCode
Led by Brian Yu
Note code is a web application designed to help teachers monitor and engage in coding with students in a classroom setting. It works similarly to google docs, where students can type code in a live-share environment, and the teacher can monitor every student’s progress by switching into the perspective of different students. We will be building this application from scratch using development tools such as the MERN stack. We welcome anyone interested in web development, as well as anyone interested in the frontend or backend development for a web application. We will go through all of the tools and languages one by one together so no prior experience or skills are needed. After the live-share coding section is finished, we will try to implement a compiler into our web application to ensure more usability.
BerkeleyRate
Led by Donny
BerkeleyRate is an online professor/course rating platform aiming to provide students comprehensive information about each course and professor. By focusing solely on Berkeley courses, BerkeleyRate is capable of presenting high-quality information and resources, which will be above any rating system online, to all students studying at cal. BerkeleyRate will also be inventing new features such as professor ranking for each courses and dual comparison between professors, which makes the platform even more interesting and useful.
Past Projects
Game Project
Led by Yaqian Tang
This project will focus on using data analysis tools to analyze the past trends and predict future trends of wildfires in the United States. Together, we will read literature reviews about wildfires, find usable datasets (especially time series data), perform data cleaning, exploratory data analysis, data visualization, hypothesis testing, and run regression models on the datasets. Our final product include a website to demonstrate our primary findings, an Instagram account to make educational posts regarding the knowledge of wildfires, and a data analysis report. In this project, you will be able to gain hands-on experience on the complete process of data analysis on a topic of interest from scratch. We are looking for people who know the basics of data analytics (equivalent to Data 8), or those who are willing to learn! Priority would be given to those who have taken upper division data science courses (Data 100 or above), but don’t worry at all if you have not – we are learning and growing together!
Red or Green?
Led by Lai Wei
This project is intended for those who are interested in the area of “Fintech,” which uses data and models to analyze the financial market. We would learn how to use technology, especially machine learning, as a powerful tool to help us understand the historical data of stock prices and even predict the future’s trend. During this semester, we would construct our own model, refine it to optimize the performance and work on the final research paper. People who have a background in Finance-Econ and Data Analytics would be a good fit for this project. We also welcome students who are interested in this area and have a passion for learning.
Vicinity
Led by Charlotte Wang
The mobile app we are developing this semester resembles a location-based chat app. It encourages people to make friends with others whom they might have spent time with but not necessarily know about. Starting from UI and business logic design, we will be building a full-stack app from scratch and learning dev tools along the way. If you are passionate about frontend / backend / full stack / mobile development, then this project is a good fit for you! You don’t necessarily need to know all the skills or have related experience to join as we will be picking up the tools you need bit by bit together.
No Paws Left Behind
We helped stray animals by investigating historical trends regarding stray animals in Bay Area and researching how pet industry is influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic. We also operated social media accounts that outreaches for our website and our projects. Besides that, we created in-person events that encouraged interested people to hang out with stray animals. At the end of the semester, we designed a website to demonstrate our primary findings.
All Aboard the Mentor-Ship
TOPPA’s internal mentorship program is an opportunity not only to engage with individuals who have developed professionally from their experiences at TOPPA, but also to explore industries aligning with their interests. Project members learn how to create an effective user experience through matching mentors and mentees, as well as how to professionally interact with industry leaders. Through front-facing work, project members also help the TOPPA community develop connections and allow members to receive firsthand insight into competitive industries.
Who's No.1 Traffic Monetization
We focus on researching traffic monetization strategies in well-known Chinese tech companies, writing a final research paper about differences between them. The paper includes an analysis of each product’s advantages and disadvantages, strategic position in its company, and future evaluation, etc., preparing members with knowledge about tech and business fields and competitive product analysis.
Cal Scheduler
In this project, we build a web app that allows students to easily plan out their 4-year course plan and generate a personalized course plan according to the student’s major and other preferences. We have frontend work with the goal of providing a straightforward interface and backend work with the goal of improving the course plan generating algorithm.
Next Unicorn
We develop a startup idea focusing on the business strategy side through brainstorming a startup idea, writing macro trends reports, developing a business plan, and giving a final pitch to all Toppa members. Members learn about entrepreneurship and business and gain research, decking, and presentation skills throughout this project.
bCrowd
This project shows the population in a certain area such as cafeterias with basic software and hardware implementation before actually going there, saving time in a busy day. Members learn about CAD, combining software and hardware, detecting Bluetooth devices with python programming, transmitting and presenting data, and designing a 3D printed shell that assembles the hardware together.
Member & Resource Directory
Toppa offers a rich variety of professional development resources and is also home to many talented members with diverse backgrounds. This project organizes this abundance of information into a member and resource directory. Members learn the ins-and-outs of the web development and design process by tools such as Adobe XD, Git, and front-end programming languages, and develops a keen sense for design while incorporating UI/UX principles.
Expanding Your Horizons
Recruiting TOPPAers; outreaching to professionals and alumni for events/panels; creating and managing social media and email campaign; building strong relationships with student clubs/organizations, campus resources/departments, and faculty.
NGO Consulting for Pandemic Professors
We are providing a holistic consulting service to an E-learning tutoring platform founded during the pandemic. Our project consists of three major components: technical system implementation, user-based marketing strategy, and fundraising operations.
Me @ ...
My project is called Me@… and the ellipse can be filled with any timeline of college life, aiming to help members resolve problems, concerns, curiosity by directly talking to people who have already encountered these things. For instance, Me@Sophomore, Me@Phase I, Me@Job Interview, etc. This event aims to answer various questions members may have at different points of their college life in a secure, private manner.
Project Content Kickstart
This is Project Content Kickstart! We will be kickstarting Toppa’s media platforms this semester and we need your help to build up and expand our content. If you have any experience in video editing software (FCPX, Adobe Premiere, or iMovie!) or enjoy editing and taking photos (Lightroom Classic, Photoshop, Illustrator) or simply have tons of marketing ideas on social medias, this is the place to show off your talent and ideas to represent this community! This project will continue to the future semesters and serve to capture the moments of Toppa.
Ecology Center
This project looks for team members who want to help the Berkeley Ecology Center. This may include tasks like website design, coding, etc. If you are interested or want an opportunity to learn then this is the perfect project for you!
Newsletter & Toppa E-book
This project focuses on developing bi-Weekly newsletter sent out to our members and alumni every other Saturday including 3 main topics: TL;DR News, Resources & Events and Q&A of the week (and maybe a fun section at the end). At the end of the semester, all the best resources and Q&A will be compiled in a Toppa e-book to be presented on our website.
AI + Stock Trading
There are 2 methods of generating income: (1) from a job, and (2) through investments. Only about 50% of Americans are invested in the stock market, this is a highly untapped market that plays a huge role in growing wealth. The goal of this project is to tap into this second field and implement leveraging technology– artificial intelligence– into making efficient executions.
Eat & Love
The project is to create a website using Google Sites from scratch to provide people with recipes given their search for ingredients. Technical experience may include some experience with website making/design and basic knowledge of coding language like Python; or someone who love to make and learn at the same time! We will be introducing a chat forum for users in this recipe recommendation website to make people feel connected!