1981

Recently retired from teaching at Lowell High School, from which she graduated in 1929,
Anne Wallach brings a proposal for a UC Berkeley Gifted Program to School of Education Dean James Guthrie and UC Berkeley Provost Doris Calloway--and they say yes!

For its inaugural year,
the UC Berkeley Gifted Program offers several seminar courses; course selections made in May and June, admission based on SAT scores.

1982

Students line up at Zellerbach Auditorium for a Talent Search recognition event; the program's first participants came primarily from among this group.

Nine classes initially offered, but overwhelming interest requires the addition of more sections; 282 students enrolled.

Abigail Lustig enters first class and now holds the record for longest continuous connection with the program; she is currently a professor of History of Science at the University of Texas, Austin.

From the beginning, Wednesday Explorations provides enrichment opportunities in conjunction with regular courses.

Program grows fast, with over 40 class sections for its second year.

1983

The program publishes its first newsletter, The UC Bee, a student-compiled publication. Article topics included: changing the program's name (which occurred in 1989), a poll asking with whom students would like to spend the day (Boy George was in the running), movie reviews (Return of the Jedi and War Games), and the university staff's reaction to teenagers on campus ("Don't the kids get younger looking each year!").

Barbara Sawyer's Journalism class begins publication of "The Academic Inquirer"--in which a young music critic predicts that the group U2 will be a huge success.

Students Suzanne Wood and Jenni Savage interview the Polka-Dot Man, a local legend who covered himself in polka dots, at his usual post at Durant & Telegraph, from which he waves at cars and gives his views on life.

1984

First Advanced Placement course offered: AP Biology, with Lois Peterson.

A Wednesday Exploration called "Design Your Own Signature" is offered for students whose penmanship cannot be read by anyone; another Exploration examines Orwell's 1984 in this eponymous year.

Never fear--lunch is here:
The Oski Mobile was the gathering spot for bites before Pat Brown's Grill opened.

1985

The first summer of the Younger Students Program (now the Elementary Division), for students ages 7-10, takes place at Washington School in Berkeley.

"Livres! Libros! et Multi Libri!", a magazine published by a Wednesday Explorations class, includes stories, poetry, drawings, and photos; its cover shows rooms full of card catalogs, then still in use.

Cal-Berkeley undergrad
Lloyd Nebres joins the program; he started as an office clerk and database administrator and over the years became a Study Lab mentor and program instructor (see 1996). He migrated the ATDP database from an ancient Unix system to the Macintosh, and has been a diehard Apple fan since 1984.

ATDP begins a
long-running partnership with the San Francisco Unified School District. Carole Swain becomes Program Director.

1986

Yoshiko Tagami joins the program staff as a student worker, and later becomes a full-time staff member and earns the nickname of "The Enforcer."

Ricardo Gonzalez,
first student from
the Central Valley, is the pioneering member of Coalinga-Huron House and blazes a trail for other students to follow.

30 students from California's Central Valley attend ATDP and Coalinga-Huron House is born. Nancy Mellor, CHH founder, is still a vital part of the program. Nancy and her students:

1987

Carol Ponzio (above) teaches with the Younger Students Program in the early years, and is still teaching with the program at its 25th anniversary.

Students in a Structured BASIC computer science course--we've come a long way in terms of technology, but the program continues to explore cutting-edge topics.

1988

Nina Gabelko becomes ATDP Director, in addition to her directorship of the School-University Partnership in Education and Research program at the Graduate School of Education.

More than 500 students attend Older Students Program, now the Secondary Division.

10-unit courses, which when the program began met twice each week, begin three-days-per-week schedule; students and teachers breathe a sigh of relief because they don't have to cram as much (well, sort of).

During the first summer of the Human Anatomy course, Elise Lustig teaches students to dissect; the course continues to be very popular among third graders 17 years later.

The Gifted Program is renamed the Academic Talent Development Program, as the admissions process moves to focus on development.

1989

Frank Worrell joins the program as instructor of Psychology and as graduate student researcher; now he is a Berkeley professor and ATDP faculty director.

Program offices move from 5th Floor of Tolman Hall to current 3rd Floor location; come see us in room 3639!

Carrie Brown joins the program. Early in the next decade (see 1992), she becomes a contestant in Jeopardy! and as such, Lloyd requests the campus sysadmins for the e-mail address: jeopardy@berkeley.edu for Carrie. :-)

1990

Over 500 students attend the Younger Students Program.

Program uses multiple indicators for application evaluation; scores from College Board SAT no longer required; before 1990, students 12 years old and even younger took the SAT when applying!

With growth of the program, pamphlet-style brochure gives way to magazine-style catalog.

Apple Computer donates Mac Pluses and ImageWriter printers to an ATDP student and a teacher; drawing winners presented with gifts at the Family Picnic.

Regarding the summer experience, a Marine Biology student is quoted in the S91 newsletter as saying: "It's amazing. I'm exhausted, but I'm exhilarated!"

1991

Program 'maven'
Lauren Sosniak visits ATDP to conduct research on how academically talented students learn, and continues to work with us today as a visiting professor from San Jose State University.

Award-winning screenwriter, the late Stanley Greenberg satisfies a dream and teaches an ATDP course on history and film, "Portraits in Decency: Doin' the Right Thing" (above).

Longtime instructor Flossie Lewis dances with her fourth-grade class, "The Melodrama & the Music Hall"; she has taught many courses with the program (below).

1992

ATDP staff member
Carrie Brown makes an appearance as a contestant on Jeopardy!

Math department chair and instructor Cheryl Lilhanand celebrates 10 years with the program.

ATDP students see, and a few meet, Whoopie Goldberg and her film crew during the shooting of "Sister Act" in Berkeley.

On July 20, the late and deeply beloved U.C. Berkeley Chancellor Chang-Lin Tien visits ATDP students at Coalinga-Huron House.

Between 1988 and 1993, students listed over
50 countries of origin--from Afghanistan to Zambia!

1993

ATDP staff member
Lloyd Nebres writes a poem inviting students to join him on what Vice President Al Gore has named "The Information Superhighway."

Computer programming students Demetrius, Lawrence, and Monique from the SFUSD program join their mentor Lloyd in constructing the ATDP onramp to the info-highway.

Older Students Program renamed Secondary Division; Younger Students Program renamed Elementary Division.

1994

50 classes offered in Secondary Division; there are 81 classes in this year's catalog!

Gary Kitajo joins ATDP and has been teaching The Practice of Law every summer since; students in the class prepare for a culminating mock trial argued before an actual judge in a San Francisco courtroom.

Scavenger Hunt revived; classes compete to see which one can learn the most about the Berkeley campus.

1995

ATDP makes online debut with a website, constructed late in the year and made ready for the 1996 summer session. It has been refined over the years, but its basic structure remains the same.

Over 1000 students, from more than 250 schools, attend Secondary Division.

A local chef teaches popular Wednesday Explorations on Bread-Making and Sushi Rolls; students of all ages carry away full stomachs, loads of food, new recipes, and new skills.

Frank Worrell wins Dissertation of the Year Award from the Graduate School of Education for research conducted at ATDP.

Cal undergraduate and former ATDP student
Gary Hsueh joins the program staff and serves as Wednesday Explorations coordinator.

1996

Lloyd Nebres'
The Internet Classroom (TIC) course is first offered and today remains a popular choice for students in Secondary Division; an active alumni group continues blogging into 2006.

Cal English major
Candace Grant joins the program staff and serves as the editor of the weekly newsletter for several summers to come.

Gemma Whelan,
who teaches Shakespeare as Theater, takes on the role of narrator La Corbie in the play "Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off" at the Edinburgh Castle pub in San Francisco.

1997

Students in the Architectural Design course take a field trip to Union Square in San Francisco to envision a redesign of the public space.

An S97 trivia hunt question asks, "Whose portrait hangs in the southeast corner of the Information Center? How is he connected with the Summer of Love, 1967?" Bonus question: "Why does the Doe entrance to the Main Stacks remind Flossie Lewis of Dante's Inferno?".

The Advanced Internet Classroom takes TIC to the next level; students in AIC design websites for Berkeley businesses, as volunteer web designers, though some are eventually paid to do so, past the end of the summer session.

Columnist Dear Prudence (the nom de plume of staffer Candace G.) debuts in the weekly newsletter, S97, answering questions about ATDP with Beatles-inspired wit and sensibility.

1998

Coalinga-Huron House almost doesn't make it to ATDP, but Cal alumnus Rey Leon and ATDP/CHH alumna Fabiola Tafolla step in to save the day (and summer) with a lot of coordinating and fundraising; the group stays at Casa Joaquin Murrieta on campus.

Flossie Lewis
longtime and beloved SD and ED instructor, is honored at the faculty inservice for ATDP faculty, on May 16th.

Staff members Gary Hsueh and Laura Shefler celebrate: Gary's association with the program begins when he takes ATDP's Russian classes starting in 1989 and has since taken on numerous roles, including student worker, Wednesday Explorations coordinator, and currently Technical Consultant (Gary is also a Cal band alumnus); Laura begins work at ATDP as a mentor and now coordinates Study Labs and teaches Art History and Reading for Creative Writing.

1999

Central Valley partnership expands to include another community and becomes Coalinga-Huron-Avenal House.

Presenting from their research, students in the Functional Neuroanatomy course display their "brains"--their intelligence and new knowledge, that is.

Edan Dekel teaches four courses--Old English, Existentialism, Language Studies, and First-Year Latin--and is still standing at the end of the summer; now he is a Classics professor at Williams College.

2000

A Wednesday Explorations group tours Civil Engineering and Mechanical Engineering labs to see demonstrations of earthquake shaker tables and centimeter-size internal combustion engines.

The Astronomy class discusses "The Search for Extra-Solar Planets," and "The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence," with Cal Professors Geoff Marcy and Jack Welch, respectively.

Weblog pioneers emerge from Lloyd's TIC and AIC classes; his weblog,
the free radical, begins its existence in early summer and remains a regular entity online to this day, and a locus for many ATDP student weblogs over the years.

The program prepares contingency plans for summer classes after PG&E warns that energy shortages might lead to rolling blackouts that could affect the Berkeley campus or Washington School.

2001

A new course, Exploring our Universe, provides students with the opportunity to use computers to research frontiers in space such as Cosmic Hot Interstellar Plasma Spectrometer, or CHIPS, a NASA mission at UC Berkeley designed to study the gases between solar systems.

The Biotechnology course introduces students to some of the latest techniques used in research, DNA electrophoresis and PCR (polymerase chain reaction).

ATDP Secondary Division offers 7 AP courses.

2002

ATDP alumnus Sean Lee attends the Air Force Academy and recounts an experience he had in Uzbekistan: upon deplaning with an American delegation, he quickly realized that the delegates could not speak with their hosts, and vice versa; recalling the Russian he had learned at ATDP, he saved the day by being able to communicate with all present.

UCSF invites ATDP students to participate in Wednesday Explorations that include presentations, speaker panels, demonstrations, and hands-on activities to get an in-depth look at being a dentist, pharmacist, nurse, or doctor.

Weblogging at ATDP explodes in popularity, spearheaded by students in TIC and AIC.

2003

CHA House throws a quninceañera bash at
Clark Kerr Campus to commemorate the long-standing partnership with ATDP. Students past and present gather for the reunion, and author and poet Gary Soto is among the guests who celebrate with CHA founder Nancy Mellor.

Pop quiz! Between 1998 and 2004, Edan Dekel taught 26 ATDP courses. Between 1989 and 2005, Anatoly Gabelko taught 46 ATDP courses. If Dekel had continued to teach four classes per summer, and Gabelko three, in what year could Dekel move ahead of Gabelko in number of ATDP courses taught?

A new course,
The Virtual ATDP (TVA), first provides a formal virtual extension of the classroom community beyond the UC Berkeley campus...

2004

...another new course, Murder & Magisteria, makes extensive use of TVA's capabilities with collaborative weblogs and postings of digital illuminated manuscripts, while the Introduction to Drawing & Design students create a virtual gallery of student work and engage in online critiques.

Earliest known instance of a child of an ATDP alumnus attending the program (if you know of an earlier instance, please let us know).

Geometry instructor (and ATDP alumnus) Javier Gonzalez accompanies a group of students to see Bill Clinton at a book-signing event at Cody's Books on Telegraph Ave.

Remembering founder
Anne Wallach,
September 23, 1912 to
October 3, 2005

2005

ATDP alumnae Laurie Mireles, Erica Turner, and Adena Young are now doctoral students at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Education; another alumnus, Damian Moskovitz is a doctoral student in Cal's Psychology Department--we encourage all alumni to let us know where they are and what they are doing.

Representatives from the UC Berkeley Office of Undergraduate Admissions, College of Environmental Design, College of Natural Resources, and Boalt Hall School of Law (above, Dean Victoria Ortiz) meet with students to talk about academic preparation and areas of study.

2006

ATDP celebrates
25
years of educational programs and opportunities,
with more than
2,100
students in Elementary and Secondary Divisions combined, taking over
120
courses and over
65
Wednesday Explorations workshops.