University of California, Santa Cruz

Overview

The University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) is a public research university located in Santa Cruz, California, United States. Founded in 1965, UCSC is part of the 10 campuses that make up the University of California system. It is classified as an R1 in the Carnegie Classification, which indicates very high research activity. It was also ranked first by the National Research Council for the publication impact of its Ph.D. programs in computer engineering.

UCSC’s academic departments are housed in four divisions and in the Jack Baskin School of Engineering. The four divisions are the Division of the Arts, Division of Humanities, Division of Physical & Biological Sciences, and the Division of Social Sciences. The university offers undergraduate, postgraduate, and doctoral programs that span a wide range of disciplines, including humanities, social science, arts, and technology.

Students pursuing a bachelor’s degree get to study in a small college setting with the advantage of learning and doing research with leading figures in their chosen fields. Postgraduate and doctoral students, on the other hand, receive full support for their academic endeavors through the university’s numerous research labs, academic centers, and studios.

Examples of undergraduate programs include Applied Linguistics and Multilingualism, Biotechnology, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, Network and Digital Technology, Music, and Robotics Engineering. Meanwhile, students can choose postgraduate programs such as Feminist Studies, Digital Arts and New Media, Natural Language Processing, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Economics, and Education.

UCSC’s beginnings can be traced back to the mid-1950s when the University of California Board of Regents approved the proposal of the City of Santa Cruz to build a new UC campus south of the Berkeley campus. Construction of the university’s buildings started in 1964 and, by 1965, it already welcomed its first students. The current site of UCSC was chosen for its picturesque landscape rather than accessibility, which led to the decision to build residences within the campus to serve as student accommodations.

UCSC has produced remarkable alumni working in fields such as the arts, entertainment, business, literature, politics, and science and technology. These include the founder of BuzzFeed and Huffington Post, Jonah Peretti; actress and comedian, Maya Rudolph; Youtube CEO, Susan Diane Wojcicki; and NASA astronaut and geologist, Kathryn Dwyer Sullivan.

The university’s faculty honors include 10 members of the National Academy of Sciences and 23 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. It has also produced seven winners of nine Pulitzer Prizes and five recipients of the MacArthur Fellows Program, also known as the "Genius Grant.”