Shout-Outs & Celebrating Student Excellence
Our students are accomplishing some amazing things and we think they deserve some spotlight! We want to celebrate the highlights of our Honors community.
Academic achievements, inspirational internships, and creative collaborations will be celebrated below and on our Instagram channel!
We are proud to celebrate their hard work and success.
Summer 2025
Lorie, Environmental Engineering
Second-Year UHP Student, Second-Year UCM Student
I took the charcoal class with Professor Richard Gomez at UCM. It was a brief 6-week summer session where I had one completed artwork due every week and did lessons, studies, and practice exercises in class. Overall, the experience was very positive, and I learned a lot about proportions and lighting for portraits. I already do art as a hobby, so I feel like this class taught me new techniques I can apply to my future artwork. The last time I took a charcoal class, I felt that I was not very good, but in this summer class I really got to see my skills advance. Doing the artworks for this class was stressful at times, but once I got focused on the work, it became a very relaxing process. The image I shared is my final project for the class, where I had to draw a portrait of a celebrity (I chose Lady Gaga). The best part of this class, in my opinion, is being covered in charcoal dust looking at the final results of each project after hours of studies and hard work.
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Emily, Political Science major and GASP minor
Second-Year UHP Student, Second-Year UCM Student
I absolutely loved my experience with the UC NRS Data Science Program in collaboration with the Smithsonian Data Science Lab. This experience was led by Cristina Soto-Balderas, Field-Based Learning Coordinator at the UC Natural Reserve System, with support from Mario Castellanos, Executive Director of the Office of Education Partnerships at UC Santa Barbara, and lectures by Dr. Alex White, Biodiversity Research Data Scientist and Director of the Smithsonian Data Science Lab.
During this summer, I had the opportunity to participate in this incredible program alongside students from our sister campuses — UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, and UC Santa Barbara. Over six weeks, we learned the fundamentals of navigating and using R for data analysis, working with real datasets from environmental science research conducted across the UC Natural Reserves.
One of the highlights was our in-person visit to the Hastings Natural History Reservation, where we learned essential field etiquette and basic orienteering skills, including how to use a compass and GPS to be field-ready. We even assembled and deployed camera traps throughout the reserve, capturing footage of the local wildlife.
To wrap up the experience, we completed a capstone project using the tidy data skills we developed throughout the program. We manipulated a dataset from Dr. Alex White’s research and presented our findings to our peers, Cristina, Alex, and Mario. It was a truly transformative experience that deepened my appreciation for data science, fieldwork, and collaborative learning.
