Campus Community

The UC Merced Office of Financial Aid and Scholarships is committed to ensuring a world-class education remains within reach for all eligible students who need financial assistance to achieve their educational goals. The office focuses on student success by providing financial aid and advising services that support student recruitment, retention and timely degree completion.

UC Merced Chancellor Dorothy Leland united with members of the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration in Washington, D.C., earlier this week to call on Congress to pass a permanent legislative solution to protect young immigrants known as Dreamers.

Jonathan Grady brings more than 14 years of experience as a researcher, educator and leader in academia to his new role as associate vice chancellor for Student Affairs and dean of students at UC Merced.

Grady comes from University of Michigan, Flint, where he was assistant vice chancellor of student success and was responsible for the vision and direction of Educational Opportunity Initiatives, Counseling and Psychological Services, Orientation, Disability and Accessibility Services, Intercultural Programming, and the Student Success Center.

More than 80 undergraduate and graduate students gathered in downtown Merced on Dec. 16 for UC Merced’s first-ever Fall Commencement.

Graduates — along with their family and friends, faculty and a score of staff volunteers — assembled for the ceremony, held at the Art Kamangar Center at the Merced Theatre. More than 700 people filled the venue’s lower and upper levels.

It’s been five years since Shavone Charles walked across the stage at commencement. On Saturday (Dec. 16), she will return as UC Merced’s first alumni keynote speaker at Fall Commencement.

As a teenager in Merced, Marcus Shaw lived a life marked by poverty, poor choices and indifference to education.

The idea of college — especially at the new UC Merced campus — seemed like an opportunity for someone else. Yet on Dec. 16, Shaw will participate in the university’s first Fall Commencement ceremony and celebrate his dream of earning a Ph.D. in sociology.

Crediting UC Merced with much of his success, Shaw said the ceremony will be one of the biggest moments of his life.

With race, immigration, rising inequality, gender discrimination and collective mobilization grabbing current headlines, the work of the UC Merced sociology unit — always relevant locally — is gaining wider recognition across the country.

For the past three years, members of the UC Merced community and friends have made the Tuesday after Thanksgiving a showstopper for our campus.

UC Merced is welcoming back its first alumni keynote speaker, Shavone Charles, to address December 2017 graduates at its first Fall Commencement ceremony on Dec. 16.

When it came time to apply for college, so many of us scrambled to compile those lists of community service hours to bolster our resumes. Was there enough? Could I explain in my personal statement what this service meant to me? 

From the time we’re young, this idea is engrained in our heads that volunteering is important. There’s probably thousands of variations that we have heard at one time or another of why you have to give back to your community and the impact that service has, but the question remained, why?