Students

Newest issue of UCLA College Magazine celebrates a spectacular century

When UCLA was founded in 1919, it only offered a two-year undergraduate program, with no option for a bachelor’s degree. In 1923, the UC Board of Regents approved expansions that transformed what was then known as the Junior College into the UCLA College of Letters and Science. The latest issue of UCLA College Magazine celebrates 100 years of the UCLA College with a range of stories highlighting the people, events and achievements that defined the past century, as well as a fascinating look ahead to what the next 100 years might bring. Join in the celebration by diving into the…

New creative writing minor is open to all UCLA undergraduates

A newly established minor will expand the opportunity for UCLA students to receive official credit for their creative writing pursuits. In replacing UCLA’s concentration in creative writing — which had been accessible only to English majors — the new creative writing minor will be open to all undergraduates, making it one of only a few UCLA minors in a creative practice. The minor also is more expansive in subject matter than the concentration was. While the minor requires students to complete two workshops in a core genre —fiction or poetry — students in the minor can pursue such diverse practices…

New English course embraces the potential of AI

A new UCLA English class is built around the premise that the best way to understand artificial intelligence tools, including their biases and limitations, is to experiment with them. The class, “Algo-Lit: An Introduction to AI Literature,” is taught by Danny Snelson, an assistant professor of English. “I think that the use of generative AI — to be specific, the type of large-language models or image synthesis tools built on massive accumulations of data — presents real ethical and moral concerns,” Snelson said. “But these tools, and the new ways of making they present, are not going away. That box…

Chancellor’s Council on the Arts looking for submissions to honor 2 students

The UCLA Chancellor’s Council on the Arts will honor two students – a graduate and an undergraduate student – as 2023 class artists. Winners will be featured in a UCLA commencement video and storytelling package on UCLA Newsroom along with receiving a $1500 honorarium each for their recognition.   Students who are from academic units represented in Chancellor’s Council on the Arts are eligible to nominate themselves or one another. These include the School of the Arts and Architecture, Herb Alpert School of Music, School of Theater, Film & Television, Division of Humanities, and Division of Social Sciences.  The submissions…

UCLA’s Russian Flagship Program builds knowledge and community

Geneva Flores, a first-year applied linguistics major, shared her experiences as a participant in UCLA’s Russian Flagship Program, which allows students of all majors to build professional-level competence in Russian through studies on campus and abroad.  “The Russian Flagship Program equips courageous global leaders with the language skills and cultural competence to build bridges between international communities,” according to the program’s website.  The website also states: “The UCLA Russian Flagship was one of the three original Russian programs funded by The Language Flagship, a federally funded initiative to revolutionize the way Americans learn languages by offering a rigorous, articulated program…

English major to publish debut novel 

Arushi Avachat, a third-year English and political science undergraduate student at UCLA, will see her debut novel, “Arya Khanna’s Bollywood Moment,” hit bookstore shelves next year.  A longtime, avid reader and writer, Avachat has also authored short stories — one of which served as the novel’s inspiration. “I had written a short story my freshman year of high school that I was really attached to,” she said. “I had a lot more to say about those characters — and then I had the idea that I wanted my novel to read like a Bollywood drama.”  Avachat worked on outlining and…

Students make remarkable finds in ‘Encountering Arabic Manuscripts’ course

If there was any question that UCLA Library Special Collections’ vast array of handwritten medieval manuscripts in Arabic, Persian and early Ottoman Turkish contained undiscovered historical gems and unique avenues for groundbreaking research, just ask doctoral student Brooke Baker. While studying an untitled text as part of UCLA’s “Encountering Arabic Manuscripts” course, Baker found that it contained a work by Abd al-Wahhab al-Sha’rani, the 16th-century mystic and scholar who founded an Egyptian order of Sufism, a mystical branch of Islam. Thinking she might have stumbled onto something rare, she showed it to Associate Professor Luke Yarbrough, who teaches the course. “On a…

English department celebrates launch of Digital Media Lab

The UCLA Department of English will celebrate the launch of its new Digital Media Lab on Friday, May 6 at noon at its location in Kaplan Hall 211.  The Digital Media Lab is the result of an initiative by a group of English faculty members whose students were increasingly interested in using multimedia resources in their scholarly work, according to department chair Ursula Heise, the Marcia H. Howard Professor of Literary Studies and director of UCLA’s Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies.  “[The lab] is not only about the creation of digital works, or research on digital works,” Heise said. “We’re…

New course helps students make educated decisions when entering workforce after graduation

Humanities students often face structural gaps when it comes to preparing for careers after graduation. A new class, Careers in Humanities (COMPLIT 191P/ENG M191P) aims to change that, offering students career advice; opportunities to build their personal portfolio, CV or resume; and help with general interviewing skills. It is a collaborative effort between the Department of Comparative Literature and the UCLA Career Center, with Professor David MacFadyen teaching the course and Senior Director of Alumni Career Engagement Gloria Ko arranging alumni speakers to bolster students’ understanding of the concepts and career pathways taught. “I just felt that there was a…