Building a Better Merrill – Two Years as Academic Assistant to the Provost

April 2024 – September 2026

Merrill College had a few interconnected problems that I spent two years working on as Academic Assistant to Provost Aims McGuinness. Students didn't feel strongly connected to their college, the MERR1 core course wasn't landing the way it should, there was no comprehensive documentation of Merrill's history anywhere, and institutional data about student characteristics across UCSC's ten colleges wasn't being used to inform programming decisions. I worked on all of these.

For the curriculum, I interviewed first through fourth-year students, ran thematic analysis, and used what I found to redesign MERR1 around college belonging, practical first-year guidance, and more interactive assignments. I co-designed the "Merrill Person" project, which exit surveys showed was students' favorite assignment of the year, and wrote Fall and Winter Quarter Time Maps to give incoming students week-by-week practical advice.

For the history gap, I built the first-ever comprehensive timeline of Merrill College from 1968 to present, going through 1,500+ articles across physical archives at McHenry Library, the Santa Cruz Sentinel, and UCSC digital collections. It's now integrated into MERR1.

For the data problem, I scraped and analyzed IRAPS enrollment data from 2020 to 2025 using Python, producing a cross-college comparison across URG, EOP, first-generation, Pell Grant, race, ethnicity, and gender, and presented the findings to the Council of Provosts and campus administrators.

Beyond those, I created a UCSC Opportunity Catalog to help students find things they didn't know existed, wrote a "Connecting Merrill Together" report with recommendations for strengthening community, and proposed the Community Engagement Coordinator position within MSG to formalize the connective work I had been doing informally for years.

From left to right: Kayson Tang, Aims McGuinness