Academics

More than 3,700 individuals visited UC Merced last Saturday during the campus’s annual Bobcat Day — a 26 percent increase over 2017 and more than any previous year.

When Mario Banuelos was 12, his mother took him into the fields to tie grape vines.

The labor was tough and the wages were meager. After just one day on the job, Banuelos knew that his path in life would be different. He worked even harder in school and earned nearly straight As. His efforts paid off when he was selected for the prestigious Gates Millennium Scholars program.

For the first time, UC Merced’s doctoral programs in the sciences have been ranked among the best in the nation, according to U.S. News & World Report’s 2019 edition of Best Graduate Schools.

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.

It’s not easy to be a college student these days.

Rising tuition has made obtaining a degree feel like more of a dream than reality for many students. Yet, now more than ever, a college degree is a prerequisite for even entry-level jobs — the bachelor’s is the new baseline.

UC Merced’s Vernal Pools and Grassland Reserve has become a hallmark of the campus — acres of preserved lands that contribute to the university’s mission of environmental conservation and while offering unique research opportunities to students and faculty.

One of the campus’s best-kept secrets, though, might be The Vernal Pool, a scholarly journal for undergraduate students’ creative writings, from poetry to plays.

Examining the power of gender seems like a topic built for today.

But UC Merced history Professor Susan Dwyer Amussen’s new book, “Gender, Culture and Politics in England, 1560-1640: Turning the World Upside Down” examines the cultural, social and political history of England and the ways the image of an upside-down world was used to convey the “proper” roles for men and women during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I.

UC Merced recently launched a new standalone Ph.D. program in Public Health, further establishing the university’s commitment to educating the next generation of scholars who are addressing the San Joaquin Valley’s unique health concerns.

The School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts (SSHA) previously offered a Ph.D. in social sciences with an emphasis in public health, but this optional track within the Social Sciences Graduate Group was never a standalone program.

Two UC Merced cognitive scientists spent part of their summer in India this year, teaching neuroscience to a group of exiled Tibetan Buddhist monks.