Patty Guerra

One question students considering attending UC Merced might ask is, "What's there to do around there?"

The quick answer is - a lot. There are plenty of ways for students to spend their leisure time in the greater Merced area, for students of varying interests:

Are you an outdoors enthusiast? Do you enjoy nights out with crowds of friends? Are you a devoted video game player? Do you like the challenge of thrift shopping? Do you prefer to just chill out, perhaps with a book while water laps gently at the shore?

Sarif Morningstar wondered something: "What happens if I grow plants using fog?"

The UC Merced student's efforts to find an answer to that question led to a research project they got paid to conduct. That in turn led to an opportunity to study plant biology in the UC Davis Ph.D. program.

Like Morningstar, many undergraduate students at UC Merced can get paid to do research under the newly adopted Learning Aligned Employment Program (LAEP).

Roughly a third of all food worldwide goes to waste.

Outside of the obvious direct costs, that waste has numerous other repercussions: much of it goes to landfills, where it generates methane, a greenhouse gas. Resources such as water and seeds are squandered. And at the same time, one in four people are experiencing food insecurity.

"We're wasting all this food when folks are going hungry," said Erin Meyer, Sustainable Food Programs coordinator for UC Merced.

After weathering a pandemic shutdown and some fairly withering criticism, UC Merced's food service programs have emerged better than ever.

The shutdown that started in 2020 brought about abrupt changes to food service operations - prepackaged items were the order of the day to feed students, and for catering, there were no orders of the day.

Materials Science and Engineering Professor Beth Nowadnick has earned a National Science Foundation (NSF) award to study materials that may provide new ways to store or process information.

Nowadnick has been collaborating for the past two years with Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (LBNL) scientist Sinead Griffin on the project that led to the grant, which totals $379,374.

Innumerable changes have come to UC Merced since ground was broken for the campus in 2002. Some of the women who helped found the campus and remain employed by UC Merced, reflected recently on the changes in the university and themselves for Women's History Month.

UC Merced once again broke a record for the number of first-year applications the university received, continuing to show impressive growth even as the national trend shows a decline in the number of students enrolling in higher education.

More than 26,000 prospective first-year, or freshmen, students applied for admission to the university. And nearly 4,000 students applied to transfer to UC Merced. Most of the applicants are from California.

Engineering gets its annual turn in the spotlight next week, and UC Merced is planning a number of events to celebrate.

Engineers Week, often shortened to EWeek, was founded by the National Society of Professional Engineers (NSPE) in 1951. This year, it takes place from Feb. 19-25 nationally. At UC Merced, events will take place Feb. 21-28.

Several UC Merced students pitched in Saturday, Jan. 28 to help people whose belongings were damaged when rains earlier this month flooded a storage facility.

Students from sports teams and on-campus organizations sorted belongings, hauled trash and cleaned up the Merced Mini Storage facility, alongside teams from the California Conservation Corps and Lowe's home improvement store. Merced Mayor Matthew Serrato also was on hand to help, and a local restaurant provided lunch for the volunteers.

The setting for the celebration marking 20 years since the groundbreaking for UC Merced was markedly different in many ways from the event it commemorated.

Wednesday's ceremony, attended by hundreds of faculty and staff - including dozens from when the university opened - took place in the Dr. Vikram and Priya Lakireddy Grand Ballroom. It was a scene far removed from the empty field where ground was broken for the 10^th University of California campus in October 2002.