Undergraduate Experience at UC Merced

Student & Alumni Success

From Wild Mushrooms to Punchlines, Bobcats Learn in Out-of-the-Box Ways

May 26, 2026

A student hones communication skills by learning how to use comedy to deliver messages.
Editor's note: This story is republished from the Spring/Summer 2026 issue of UC Merced Magazine. Walk across UC Merced’s campus on any weekday, and you might hear laughter spilling from a classroom, feel the thrum of a wind tunnel or spot students crouched in a field searching for...
A meeting of the UC Merced Battery Challenge team.

UC Merced Team Picked for Federal EV Battery Competition

A team from UC Merced has been selected to participate in the Department of Energy (DOE) "BattChallenge," a three-year competition to develop a battery for an electric vehicle....
Entries into a logo contest for First-Generation Student Week are displayed

First-Generation Students Offer Advice for Those Who Come Next

Nearly 65 percent of UC Merced's undergraduate students are the first in their families to go to college. Being a college student of any kind can be a thrilling, confusing, challenging, exciting...
A climate-action tabling event.

Labor, Community-based Groups Key to Addressing Climate Challenge, Study Shows

One of the major challenges of this century is democratically engaging institutions and large numbers of people with strategies to mitigate global warming by minimizing greenhouse gas emissions. A...

Campus and Academic Growth Highlighted in UC Merced State of the University Address

Distinguished rankings, new academic offerings, world-class research and campus expansions were among the highlights of the UC Merced State of the University address delivered by Chancellor Juan...
Alumnus Edwin Shen designed a multi-material bioprinter with novel features that improve resolution and embed hydrogels with concentration gradients of small molecules.

UC Merced Alum Drives Innovation in Drug Manufacturing

You could almost say Edwin Shen was destined to become a bioengineer. His mother, a medical doctor, practices pathology in Northern California, and his father retired from a career as a mechanical...

UC Merced Ranks in the Top 10 for Economic Mobility

UC Merced is among the top 10 U.S. universities for driving economic mobility for its graduates, according to a new study by think tank Third Way. In its second annual national assessment of the...
Biviana Oseguera

Mega-Interstellar Structure Fuels Undergraduate’s Winning Research

Big-wave surfing is a thing these days, but hardly anyone is riding a wave as big as the one Biviana Oseguera is on. The physics major is studying the 9,000-light-year long Radcliffe Wave, a...
Student Kat Corti describes work being done at UC Merced's Experimental Smart Farm.

'Farming Data': UC Merced Students Spend Summer Working with Crops and Spreadsheets

For UC Merced students working to maintain the campus's Experimental Smart Farm this summer, the day's tasks can range from the high-tech to the grubby. Kat Corti and Austin Mercado,...
Shuang Feng and Dilawer Ali recently won awards for their work.

Research into Electric Vehicles Earns Awards

Two of mechanical engineering Professor Ricardo de Castro 's Ph.D. students recently earned awards for their research on electric vehicles. Dilawer Ali, whose work centers on the...

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