They brought their lab and their bags from Arizona when they
moved to California in 2003, arriving in Merced with aspirations of
helping build a University of California campus.
Peggy O’Day, a professor in UC Merced’s School of
Natural Sciences who taught at Arizona State University, convinced
two of her students to follow her to the Golden State.
“The basic draw was just to be able to start a new
university and start a new program that wasn’t really bound
by precedent,” she said, “that we could be
creative.”
Merced, which the UC built partly to satisfy growing enrollment
demand and to extend the system into the state’s heartland,
will open to about 1,000 students in fall 2005.
Roughly 100 will enter Merced’s freshly constructed and
unconventional graduate programs, for which faculty and
administrators are scrambling to prepare as they work out of
offices at Castle Air Force Base, the university’s temporary
location.
In place of departments, the school’s interdisciplinary
approach to education lets graduate students choose from five
concentrations called “emphases”: quantitative biology;
molecular science and engineering; environmental systems; social,
behavioral and cognitive sciences; and world cultures.
A sixth area, computer and information science, is in the
making, said Keith Alley, dean of graduate studies.
While Merced doesn’t have ready-made resources like
well-established labs and a lot of money for travel, the small
nature of the university means graduate students are treated from
day one to personal links with professors, Alley said.
There are just 14 students, all graduate level, at Merced this
year. The number of faculty hired was 41 as of February, according
to the university’s Web site.
“Students are really not just left to their own devices
here,” Alley said, a fact to which Nelson Rivera, a doctorate
student in natural sciences and one of O’Day’s Arizona
crowd, can attest.
“He’s the vice chancellor of the graduate division,
and I talk to him every day,” Rivera said of Alley.
“We have a lot of access.”
The proximity of UC Berkeley and other universities means
students have access to equipment and classes that are a few hours
drive away.
Rivera took a thermodynamics course at UC Davis last semester
and is doing research at Stanford University. He said the trips to
Davis were a bit stressful ““ four hours on the road Tuesdays
and Thursdays ““ but that the education was worth the
time.
At Merced, the lab where he and O’Day work lies in an old
office building on the air force base the military shut down
several years ago.
Rivera said he was a bit surprised by the lack of space ““
there is only one bench in the room. The days are filled with small
inconveniences, like not being able to buy standard materials
because no store exists nearby.
“There’s absolutely no kind of structure right
now,” he said.
“It’s been frustrating at times because I used to be
able to go and buy things if I needed them.”
But some adjustments Rivera and O’Day have had to make add
to the novelty and excitement of being at Merced, Rivera said. The
ASU team created standard operating procedures and safety protocol
for their new working area.
There is also no technician to go to for help.
“If something goes wrong now, we have to kind of figure it
out ourselves or be a little inventive,” Rivera said.
Besides occasional surprises in day-to-day routines, Alley said
Merced exudes the flavor of a corporate atmosphere. Without
students, the campus resembles an office more than a school, said
Alley, who came from the University of Illinois, which had a
population of 50,000.
He said as September approaches, the feeling at Merced is one of
stress and anticipation, the sentiment that when students arrive in
fall, “We’re going back to what we came here
for.”
The air force base is a short drive from the plot of land where
Merced will open next year, and those like Alley, O’Day and
Rivera who came early got to see the transformation from a dirt
construction site into brand new facilities.
“Watching the buildings go up on the main campus has also
been pretty fun,” O’Day said. “We drive out there
every time we have job candidates, and you kind of drive by once a
month.”