UC Merced, the 10th campus in the University of California system, welcomed it's first 1000 students today. The selection process for a new UC Campus began back in 1988 and the Merced site was selected in 1995. It's the first UC undergraduate campus to be built since UC Santa Cruz opened in 1965.

Merced is located in the middle of the San Joaquin Valley, within a two-hour drive from the cities of San Francisco and Sacramento, and from the natural beauty of the Pacific Ocean and Yosemite National Park. There are currently three schools within the university: Engineering, Natural Sciences, and Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts.

Renewable energy systems will be a major focus at the university along with a heavy emphasis on interdisciplinary research. As a graduate of UCLA who developed my own interdisciplinary education across three schools (evolutionary biology, environmental science and then a graduate degree in economic geography), I hope that UC Merced will continue to devote resources to help students cross traditional boundaries.

It looks like they are starting out with a good foundation. As Jessica Green, assistant professor in the UC Merced School of Natural Sciences put it,"...it's cool, I sit next to a philosophy professor, a Chinese historian, a mathematician, a physicist and a poet." If that's not interdisciplinary, then I don't know what is.