Students

As UC Merced’s new energy manager, it’s Varick Erickson’s job to watch every kilowatt hour used on campus and identify ways to save them.

“It’s a lot like rummaging around in the couch and looking for change,” Erickson said.

Except the spare kilowatt hours he finds could save the campus hundreds of thousands of dollars.

MERCED, Calif. — Though UC Merced looked back this year to celebrate the 10^th anniversary of the campus’s groundbreaking, signs of what the future will hold continue to come into focus.

Those signs include cutting-edge research moving forward in the San Joaquin Valley -- the state's fastest growing region -- and around the world, the growing campus, and the ever-strengthening bond between the campus and the community.

Students with a variety of skills and perspectives make up a team that’s taking engineering principles into some of the area’s wildlands to further education and promote awareness about the environment.

Counting the number of species that live in the Earth’s oceans sounds as impossible as counting the grains of sand on a beach.

But a global collaboration involving a UC Merced researcher and a graduate student is doing just that, and found that about a third of all the oceans’ species are still undescribed.

That doesn’t mean they cannot be counted, though.

UC Merced is one of only seven universities nationwide to receive a grant from the Council of Graduate Schools to develop new approaches for enhancing graduate student skills for assessing undergraduate learning, and to help prepare students for future careers as university faculty members.

In addition to being the only UC campus to receive a grant, UC Merced is among prestigious company.

Zhijiang "Justin" Ye wasn’t expecting to attend the newest campus in the UC system.

He just wanted to work with Professor Ashlie Martini.

When Ye, then a student at University of Minnesota, connected with Martini and asked to join her research group, he found out she wasn’t staying at Purdue University, where he planned to earn his doctoral degree.

Shrubs blooming in a specific area of Africa might hold the answers to feeding millions of people on that continent, and possibly others.

Professor Arnold Kim’s music couldn’t be more different than that of student-staff-alumni band Feeling Gravity’s Pull.

Kim’s The Yellow Hope Project work is heavily influenced by what he has been listening to for years – old-school country, soul, blues and folk. It’s quiet and confessional, moody and, well, kind of sad.

UC Merced’s first NAIA women’s soccer team is going to have a short season – five home games and nine away games.

That’s by design.

UC Merced senior Patricia Paredes didn’t grow up in the best neighborhood or have the easiest childhood.

But she overcame those hardships to graduate from a San Jose high school and enroll at the University of California’s newest campus.