A partnership with the UCLA Brain Research Institute and an education nonprofit aims to make scientific studies more accessible to Spanish speakers.
Arushi Avachat, who plans to graduate in June with degrees in English and political science and a South Asian studies minor, is the latest UCLA student to win the prestigious Marshall Scholarship. This is the third consecutive year in which a UCLA student or alumnus has received the highly competitive scholarship, which funds up to three years of graduate study in the United Kingdom for U.S. undergraduates or recent graduates. Avachat is one of 51 winners chosen from among more than 1,000 applicants for 2024. She plans to pursue master’s degrees in English and American studies, and in global and imperial…
Sydney Do credits an entire community with paving her path to UCLA. After high school, the Maryland native moved to California to live with her grandparents and attend community college. But when her grandmother died and her grandfather’s health failed, the teenage Do found herself living on her own with no family support. Searching for connection in the wider world, she volunteered at Mary’s Kitchen, an Orange County nonprofit supporting people experiencing homelessness. When the city temporarily shut down the facility, Do became an advocate for its guests, many of whom had mental illnesses or disabilities. She also volunteered at…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…