Current Students - Undergraduates

When Carol Christ’s staff asked her how she wanted to be sworn in as UC Berkeley’s 11th chancellor, she immediately knew the answer: with 600 new graduates and their families.

Christ, who is the first woman to lead the university in its 149-year history, was formally inaugurated on Sunday, just minutes before presenting Ph.D., master’s and bachelor’s degrees to the winter graduating class.

Robert Full wants to tap the diverse experiences of UC Berkeley undergraduates to teach them the fun of discovering biology’s secrets and the innovations that can spring from hacking them. Maybe he’ll spark a few entrepreneurs in the process.

UC Berkeley undergraduates Kelly Richeson and Gina Niceforo are proud to be Bears. But the 56-year-old retired Ventura County firefighter and the 37-year-old former South Lake Tahoe waitress are equally glad to be OWLs. They’re members of Older Wiser Learners (OWLs), a support group on campus that’s gaining popularity with Berkeley’s 1,660-plus undergraduate re-entry students, who are defined as age 25 and older and having had at least a five-year absence from college.

Neha Zahid, a junior double major in public health and molecular biology at UC Berkeley, traveled to Nepal in the winter of 2016 to teach proper nutrition and oral hygiene, provide basic preventive dental care and emergency treatment, and measure indicators of oral health and nutrition in the local children and families. Hands-on research experiences like these have become a hallmark of the Berkeley undergraduate education, where students are participating in discovery experiences that are the very essence of research.