Undergraduate Students

More than 22,000 students applied to UC Merced for the Fall 2017 semester, and about 2,300 are now beginning their educational journeys on campus. Among those, 24 rose to the top of the class to be named Regents Scholars, recipients of the University of California’s most prestigious scholarship award.

First-year student Michael Grey is one of those select 24, having proven himself through determination and diligence. He said taking advanced placement and honors courses in high school in Antelope, just north of Sacramento, motivated him to succeed academically.

The University of California, Merced, received the largest incoming class of students in its 13-year history this semester, as total enrollment neared 8,000 for the first time.

The fastest-growing university in the nation, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, UC Merced now enrolls 7,375 undergraduate and 592 graduate students for a total of 7,967 students — an 8.6 percent increase from 7,336 in 2016, as reported in the university’s fall census.

On Sept. 22, MacArthur "Genius" Award winner and Stanford University bioengineering Professor Manu Prakash will deliver the keynote lecture at the first annual open house for UC Merced’s Center for Cellular and Biomolecular Machines (CCBM), a National Science Foundation Center of Research Excellence in Science and Technology (NSF-CREST).

More than 2,200 students — many entering their first year at UC Merced — arrived last weekend in cars, trucks and minivans packed to the gills with living essentials from clothing and toiletries to laptops and microwaves.

Move-in weekend is always a bustling time on campus as parents, families and friends help their Bobcats get settled in and spend some time on the campus with them before heading home.

Starting this semester, students in the School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts (SSHA) will have a new major option: Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES).

Considering that the United States spends about $3.3 billion on United Nations-related activity each year, including peacekeeping — and President Donald Trump has proposed a 40 percent cut in that spending — this seems like a good time for U.S. policy makers to have a clear understanding of how the U.N. works and how to navigate its politics to get desired outcomes.

UC Merced alumna Linda Barreto always wanted to become a lawyer, but an experience in college helped reinforce her career path.

Since 2006, 10 UC Merced undergraduates have been awarded the prestigious Donald A. Strauss Foundation scholarship. This year, two more joined their ranks.

UC Merced’s branch of the Blum Center for Developing Economies rebooted this spring with a faculty-led effort to spend two years working on becoming the hub for all food-security-related research and outreach on and off campus.

Part of that effort includes seed grants for UC Merced researchers. The Blum Center just announced this year’s winners:

Manuel Meraz transferred to UC Merced with a mission: to revive what had once been an award-winning, student-led robotics scene on campus.