Jenni Samuelson watched intently as a handful of students rehearsed a final scene. The lines were brief, bouncing from actor to actor, several voices working as one. Samuelson leaned forward, smiling, her eyes willing them on.
When they finished, she threw up her hands, sprang from her chair and showed the students the hairs standing on her forearm.
“You’ve got it,” she told them. “Lock it in!”
A throng of people came to UC Merced on a crisp, blue-sky Saturday for Bobcat Day. More than 7,000 were registered to attend the April 18 event for admitted and prospective first-year and transfer students, along with their families.
Spending an hour with one of California’s most accomplished storytellers left a mark on Rowan Alcocer.
“I was impressed by his ability to find a metaphor in almost anything,” the UC Merced student said. “He made his points in a way that was easy to understand.”
Alcocer, a first-year political science major, and other students in a California history class heard a talk by author and journalist Mark Arax, whose deeply reported stories reveal the people and paradoxes that stir the Central Valley he calls home.
A highly customizable degree that rewards curiosity, reaches out to a diverse set of learners and prepares scholars for people-centered careers has arrived at UC Merced.
Liberal studies, a bachelor’s program that taps into disciplines in the School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts, debuts in the fall 2026 semester. Students can parlay the degree’s flexibility with core UC Merced attributes such as undergraduate research and easy access to professors and advisers.
Taliyah Miller would be the first to tell you she arrived at UC Merced with an unwavering, long-range goal: become an anesthesiologist. What she could not have predicted was that a difficult roommate, a therapist’s question and a job she forgot she applied for would upend that goal and leave her better for it.
Miller was raised in Stockton, the third-largest city in the San Joaquin Valley. As the youngest of three with siblings several years older, it was like being an only child. She developed an independent personality early on.
As a child of the Central Valley and a member of a Native tribe, Grace Grinder developed an early awareness of health care disparities affecting rural regions and underserved communities.
While in third grade, Grinder lost her grandmother to what she described as too few physicians nearby to provide timely, quality care. That loss planted a seed.
em·pa·thy (noun): the ability to recognize, understand and share the thoughts, emotions and perspectives of another person.
It is a means of connection, a path to understanding. Can you see where I’m coming from? Walk a mile in my shoes.
Three Merced painters, united in friendship and in their steadfast determination not to compromise their creative values, are serving as UC Merced’s first locally based artists-in-residence.
The brushes of Ruben Aguilera Sanchez, Frank Ayala and Abel Corchado create surreal scenes of fieldhands and crops coalescing in blues and reds, of a rural street splashed in watercolor, of shark fins cutting through a beach as a sandcastle rises from the surf.
UC Merced, a beacon of academic achievement in the San Joaquin Valley, is also a powerful driver of economic growth and prosperity in the region it was created to serve.
Should a scientist who sees signs of global catastrophe sound an early alarm or wait until more conclusive evidence is in? Does going public lead to swifter action or give naysayers more time to discredit the message?
