It’s been five years since Shavone Charles walked across the stage at commencement. On Saturday (Dec. 16), she will return as UC Merced’s first alumni keynote speaker at Fall Commencement.

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.

For the past three years, members of the UC Merced community and friends have made the Tuesday after Thanksgiving a showstopper for our campus.

UC Merced is welcoming back its first alumni keynote speaker, Shavone Charles, to address December 2017 graduates at its first Fall Commencement ceremony on Dec. 16.

When it came time to apply for college, so many of us scrambled to compile those lists of community service hours to bolster our resumes. Was there enough? Could I explain in my personal statement what this service meant to me? 

From the time we’re young, this idea is engrained in our heads that volunteering is important. There’s probably thousands of variations that we have heard at one time or another of why you have to give back to your community and the impact that service has, but the question remained, why?

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.

If you’ve ever wondered why people stand where they do on the political spectrum, science might have at least part of the answer: People can be biologically predisposed to certain feelings toward politics and society.

A new paper lead-authored by UC Merced graduate student Chelsea Coe indicates that physiological factors can predict how someone will react when presented with political scenarios — an idea that demonstrates an emerging area of study, the intersection of biology and politics.

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.