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Courtesy of UC Merced |
Historic opening for UC Merced
by cynthia lee
today staff writer
On Sept. 5, Cassandra Nguyen of Arcadia will make history when she takes her place in the inaugural freshman class of the first American research university to be established in the 21st century. On that day, UC Merced in the Central Valley will officially become the first new UC campus to open its doors in 40 years.
Starting with a student body of 1,000 undergraduate and graduate students and three schools (Engineering; Natural Sciences; and Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts), UC Merced has been 17 years in the making. The campus will accommodate as many as 25,000 students over the next 30 years.
For now, there’s a student village with housing for 600, a central plant and telecommunications building and the Leo and Dottie Kolligian Library, which will also function as a classroom and administrative office building, an IT center and de facto student union.
That’s just fine by Nguyen, one of 850 incoming freshmen. “I’m the kind of person who likes to make the best of things,” said the biology major, who will live on the 2,000-acre rural campus where cows still graze. (“Cool!” she raved.) The student-teacher ratio? 17-to-1.
Nguyen will have lots of company from the L.A. basin. About a third of UC Merced’s students will come from Southern California, a third from the Central Valley and the rest from the Bay Area.
“The statistic that blows me away the most is that 47% of these entering students will be the first in their families to go to college,” said Chancellor Carol Tomlinson-Keasey. Access to a quality college education has been a primary reason why UC Merced was located in the San Joaquin Valley, where college-going is not a tradition. About 32% of Nguyen’s class self-report they are underrepresented minorities; 68% receive financial aid.
Also awaiting opening day is Associate Professor Tom Harmon, who left UCLA’s Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science in 2003 for “a rare opportunity to start something from scratch.” Still tied to UCLA through his work with the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing, Harmon is one of 60 charter faculty members chosen from among 13,000 applicants.
The engineering professor said he has always enjoyed making “something great out of nothing.” To pull together faculty, bylaws, rules and procedures where none existed has been extremely hard work, admitted the professor, who has served on numerous search committees and chaired the graduate and research councils while keeping up his research.
Administrative Vice Chancellor Lindsay Desrochers, who oversees construction, also knows what pioneering a new campus means.
“Just remember what UCLA looked like in 1927,” the alumna said. “The campus was out in the middle of nowhere. If you look at old pictures of the campus, it looks just like us.” |
