Leia Yen, who graduated from UCLA in 2019, has won the prestigious Marshall Scholarship, making her the first Bruin to win in nine years, and also the first UCLA transfer student to receive the award.
On a sunny autumn Saturday at the Southeast-Rio Vista YMCA in the city of Maywood, kids colored drawings and played Jenga while their parents and other family members underwent basic health screenings conducted by volunteer nurses.
Based on its successful first few years of incubating startups at UCLA, the Blackstone Charitable Foundation has partnered with the University of California to bring the Blackstone LaunchPad to eight more UC campuses.
The community engagement and social change minor changed its name this fall from the civic engagement minor.
The change intends to better reflect the component of the curriculum that involves field-learning through community involvement, said Douglas Barrera, the associate director at UCLA Center for Community Learning, the department under which the minor is housed.
UCLA’s Center for Community College Partnerships, a unit of the Academic Advancement Program, has been announced as one of four national 2019 Examples of Excelencia for its efforts to increase transfer rates and success of Latino community college students.
Research conducted by the Academic Advancement Program (AAP) has found that students in AAP have higher graduation rates compared to the overall underrepresented minority student population at UCLA – evidence that AAP is helping to close achievement gaps between underrepresented minority students and non-underrepresented students.
AAP provides academic support for first generation, low-income and students who have been historically underrepresented in higher education through mentoring, workshops, research programs, counseling, scholarships, peer-facilitated learning, and more.
AAP’s Assessment, Research and Evaluation team analyzed graduation rates, breaks and stops in enrollment, and GPAs of AAP students of freshmen standing that entered UCLA in fall 2012 (a total of 989 students). Of the students in the 2012 cohort, 70 percent graduated in four years, 87 percent graduated in 5 years and 89 percent graduated in 6 years.
The five-year graduation rate of AAP students was only 5 percent lower than that of non-underrepresented students. This is a smaller gap than the general underrepresented minority student population (including both AAP and non-AAP students), in which the five-year graduation rate was 8 percent lower than non-underrepresented students.
At the six-year graduation rate, AAP students again performed better than the general underrepresented minority population. The graduation rate was just 3 percent shy of the non-underrepresented population, compared to 7 percent lower among the general underrepresented minority population.
Charles Alexander, associate vice provost for student diversity and director of AAP, said AAP has been on a quest to evaluate and assess its students’ progress and graduation rates for the last four years. The data will help identify areas in which AAP can provide academic and student support services in a more targeted manner.
“I believe the increase in graduation rates for underrepresented minorities have to do with quarterly monitoring of academic progress by our counselors and being able to provide support services such as peer learning, emergency crisis support, and financial assistance,” he said.
As the 10 dancers moved across the studio floor in Kaufman Hall, their instructor closely watched how each dancer’s body movements transitioned from one to the next.
Victoria Marks, associate dean of the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture and professor of choreography, offered encouragement and challenged the dancers to pay closer attention to the way they could shape space both individually and in pairs.
Judy Mark was observing her students working in their four-person groups in her Autism Media Lab when she noticed one group quietly working on their laptops. No one was talking with each other.
Karida Brown, UCLA assistant sociology professor, was inspired to create a support network for academics of social change last year when she realized how many of her contemporaries, herself included, would consider themselves a combination of scholar, organizer and activist — just like NAACP co-founder and scholar W.E.B. Du Bois.
The inaugural Chancellor’s Award for Community-Engaged Research, which is supported by the Chancellor’s office and the UCLA Center for Community Learning, has allocated six $10,000 research grants to develop new undergraduate research courses.
