Student Life & Careers
A welcoming community, hands-on teaching experience, and the resources to launch your career.
Community & Events
Students and researchers from Professor Michael Dawson’s lab during coastal field work.
LES builds community through regular events:
LES Orientation Day
For incoming students
Annual Graduate Student Retreat
At a UC Field Station
Annual LES Department Scientific Retreat
Second-Year Talks, lightning talks, and a poster session
LES Seminar Series
Invited speakers, faculty, and Fourth-Year Talks, with students helping select speakers
Social Events
Trivia nights, coffee hours, networking lunches, a holiday party, and the end-of-year LES Lake Day barbecue
Inclusion & Recruitment
LES is committed to building a welcoming, supportive community. About half of current LES-advised graduate students are women, and about half are from historically marginalized groups. The faculty is gender balanced, and four faculty members came to UC Merced through the UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program. LES recruits through partnerships with the programs below, and reviews applications holistically.
Teaching Opportunities
LES students build teaching and communication skills through teaching assistantships, LES 202, the program’s required talks, and teacher-training workshops offered by UC Merced’s Center for Engaged Teaching and Learning (CETL). LES coursework also addresses mentoring and the TA role.
Research Resources & Facilities
UC Merced Library
Access to UC-wide collections (about 36 million volumes) and the California Digital Library
Library GIS Center
Workshops, consultations, spatial software, and Research Data Management services
MERCED High-Performance Computing
2,000+ cores, 18 TB RAM, GPU nodes, JupyterHub, and research data storage
Shared Equipment
Shared departmental equipment and specialized instruments in faculty labs
Yosemite Field Station
Home of the graduate student retreat
A Natural Laboratory
The Central Valley and Sierra Nevada as a natural laboratory for field research
Careers & Outcomes
LES graduates are prepared for careers in academia, government, industry, and nonprofit organizations, in areas such as climate adaptation, ecosystem restoration, and decision support for resource managers and policymakers.
Common roles include:
Members of Professor Rebecca Ryals’ lab.
Plan your next step
Career development support is available through the Graduate Division’s UCM GradPRO program.
