Undergraduate Students

Traditional UC Merced events — Homecoming, Preview Day and Family Weekend, plus the Chancellor’s Scholars recognition ceremony — came together for a first-of-its-kind bundle of activities that highlighted the campus for current and prospective students, alumni, family members and friends, and the community. Events included a women’s volleyball game, information sessions, women’s and men’s soccer games, a tailgate party and karaoke.

Topics ranging from ethnobotany, public health and feminism to agriculture, urban growth and social movements are among the highlights of the Mesoamerican Studies Center’s upcoming conference at UC Merced.

UC Merced’s Homecoming Oct. 20-22 will draw students, staff, faculty, alumni, family and friends together for a weekend of activities that highlight the campus and the community.

UC Merced students had the chance to gain knowledge and leadership skills for their personal and academic careers at the 2017 Leadership Conference, hosted by the campus’s Margo F. Souza Student Leadership Center on Sept. 23.

Now in its 11th year, the annual conference was redesigned to help facilitate deep transformational learning to increasing student leadership on campus and beyond.

Beginning this year, UC Merced’s fall graduates will have an earlier occasion to celebrate their outstanding accomplishments.

UC Merced is launching a new tradition with its first Fall Commencement. The intimate ceremony, which will be held at 11 a.m. Dec. 16 in the Art Kamangar Center at the historic Merced Theatre downtown, will include all the pomp and circumstance at spring commencement — caps and gowns, full regalia and crossing the stage in front of friends and family.

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.

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).