Undergraduate Students

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).

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.