Undergraduate Students

First-generation Students Shine at UC Merced. This Week Celebrates Them

November 3, 2025

UC Merced Professor Rose Scott, student Narciso Martinez Solorio

More than six in 10 UC Merced undergraduates are the first in their families to attend a university. The national average for four-year universities is about two in 10. Opening doors to opportunity for first-generation students is infused into UC Merced’s DNA. Young people who had little...

Despite Constraints, UC Merced Enrollment Continues to Grow

Enrollment at the University of California, Merced, this fall has climbed to another all-time high of 6,685 students — an increase of 6.7 percent over Fall 2014, according to headcount figures...

Program Makes Transition Easier for Transfer Students

Four weeks after her move to UC Merced in January 2014, psychology major Valara Villanueva wasn’t sure if she fit in. She felt academically prepared, but the transition from community college to a...

New Supercomputer Can Advance Diverse Array of Research

A new supercomputer assembled on campus this summer is the first step toward making UC Merced a computational training ground for researchers throughout the Central Valley. “We can do extraordinarily...

New Students Gain Tutoring, Support From Peers

College can be intimidating — new classes, new people, new responsibilities, and that’s before you even get to the coursework itself. For some, the transition can be difficult. UC Merced’s Peer...

Students Recognized for Important MESA Lab Projects

Professor YangQuan Chen has many reasons to be proud of his Mechatronics, Embedded Systems and Automation (MESA) Lab. Besides being extremely popular — so popular the lab has to turn away applicants...

New Grant Aids Underrepresented Students With Undeclared Majors

A new grant from the U.S. Department of Education will help the University of California, Merced, establish important support services for first-generation and low-income students who have yet to...

Sustainability Ideas Lead to Award-Winning Proposal

Undergraduate student Andrew John De Los Santos wasn’t passionate about sustainability until he started sorting through trash as a recycling and composting intern at UC Merced last fall. While...

Campus Continues to Set Precedents in Sustainability

UC Merced is the only university in the country to have all of its buildings certified under the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program. That body...

SSHA Professors Conducting Summer Research Projects

Like their colleagues in science and engineering, researchers in UC Merced’s School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts are keeping busy this summer with a wide variety of projects. Among them...