Jody Murray

On a spring day in Merced’s Applegate Park, the man sat in front of a camera, spinning memories. He described decades of Latin music and dance pulsing in the city, moments drawn from eight decades of life and stories told by aunts and uncles.

His two interviewers took notes and checked the microphone’s levels. All good.

Then came a sound that smothered his voice — the blast of a horn and clatter of rolling steel as a train passed, only two blocks away. They waited. When it was quiet again, the man, David Soria, smiled.

Five UC Merced faculty members are among the first awardees of a UC-wide honor given for exemplary research in budding academic careers.

The Early Career Faculty Research Excellence Awards, launched last fall, support commitment to scholarship and creative activity across the 10-campus system. The awards build on a range of programs and initiatives across the system designed to support thriving faculty careers at UC. 

Students in a UC Merced course stepped off campus and into the real world, developing flyers, website pages and even a TikTok account for a downtown arts center.

Staff at the center became clients and the students contractors in a spring semester project that produced marketing materials, forged relationships with the community and gave students an experience that in-class exercises can’t provide.

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.

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.

Written words can do more than communicate. They can also unlock the writer’s ability to process distress, identify hurtful feelings and take control of personal conflict.

UC Merced has debuted a writer-in-residence program with one of California’s premier chroniclers of its history, especially the titanic power plays for land and water that have shaped the state’s growth and loom over its future.

Mark Arax, a Fresno native, author and former Los Angeles Times journalist, will host workshops about his craft throughout the academic year. His presence on campus also will offer inside access to a working author.

If Arden, the sprawling, wild forest in William Shakespeare’s “As You Like It,” were in the United States instead of the Bard’s imagination, it would certainly be a national park.

Like Yosemite.

That is why this light comedy is an ideal fit for the annual UC Merced theater project that weaves modern issues of environmental stewardship into the 16th-century playwright’s words.