Student Experience
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UC Santa Cruz debuts on CodeSignal’s University Report
A new ranking demonstrates Banana Slugs’ software engineering career readiness
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Engineering student wins NVIDIA Agents for Impact Hackathon
Preet Karia built an AI-powered tool to turn physics notes into 3D visualizations.
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UC Santa Cruz trio takes third at 2026 Mistral AI hackathon with cybersecurity platform
A team of UC Santa Cruz students and an alumnus earned third place at the 2026 Mistral AI Worldwide Hackathon in San Francisco for developing an artificial intelligence-powered cybersecurity solution to help companies prevent phishing attacks.
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UC Santa Cruz awarded grant to promote and support open scholarship, engaged mentoring
UC Santa Cruz will launch a pioneering initiative to support and promote open science, open scholarship, and high-quality graduate student mentoring by developing guidelines to evaluate and recognize this important work.
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With fastest solver and fourth place for D1 schools, UC Santa Cruz finishes strong at 2025 Codebreaker Challenge
The challenge tasks students to develop their reverse engineering and cryptography skills using a realistic cybersecurity scenario
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UCSC’s Right Livelihood Center empowers the next generation of activists
The Right Livelihood Center at UC Santa Cruz offers students a range of opportunities to connect with global visionaries. Students Natalie Capobres (Kresge ’26, environmental studies) and Kevin Lin (Kresge ’26, community studies) share their experiences.
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Against all odds, popular math animator Grant Sanderson wooed into the redwoods
Mathematics Department convinced famous YouTuber to speak on campus, enthralling a full house with visualizations of high-dimensional geometry that powers large language models
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In Crown College’s innovation lab, students work on industry-driven challenges
In Crown College’s Corporate Innovation Laboratory (CRWN 102), students like Evan Rantala and Julien Howard address industry-driven challenges alongside tech and community partners. The course, part of Crown’s Innovation & Entrepreneurship Certificate, pairs academic learning with hands-on experience that extends beyond the classroom.
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The creation of the Cigarette Surfboard
Alumnus Ben Judkins’s (Kresge ’17, film and digital media) award-winning documentary follows the creation of the Cigarette Surfboard: A surfboard created by friend Taylor Lane from 10,000+ cigarette butts collected off beaches. Judkins’s documentary has helped influence legislation in Santa Cruz County, and will be screened at UC Santa Cruz on March 8.
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Slugs in Love 2026: Celebrating love stories from UCSC alumni
UC Santa Cruz alumni share their stories of how they found one another among the redwoods.
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Why more UC Santa Cruz students are graduating in three years
Three-year graduation is becoming more common at UC Santa Cruz, where intentional planning and advising have helped raise the three-year graduation rate to 10.3 percent, the highest in the University of California system.
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Immersion in childhood cancer research transforms undergrads into scientists—and advocates
The Treehouse Childhood Cancer Initiative is giving 80 students the opportunity to become cancer researchers for a quarter, thanks in part to generous funding from the UCSC Degree-Defining Experiences Program and the Dragon Master Initiative.