Melinda Guzman, Cathy Rodriguez Aguirre and Lydia Ramirez attended UC Davis at different times, pursued different majors in the College of Letters and Science, and followed different paths to successful careers in law, business advocacy and banking. Their paths converged at various times, most recently with a shared honor: each was named to The Sacramento Bee’s inaugural list of Top 25 Latino Change Makers for leading positive transformations in their communities.

Each year, the UC Davis College of Letters and Science names two graduating seniors as the Herbert A. Young Award and Leon H. Mayhew Memorial Award recipients in recognition of outstanding academic achievement, community service and extracurricular involvement in the college. The college honors and celebrates the incredible leadership that both these students have shown our academic community.

Does repeating a word in a text improve the comprehension and spelling of college students studying Spanish? How many repetitions is enough? How many is more than enough? Does making some words bold, italicized or underlined help with definitions and spelling? Those are some of the questions UC Davis Spanish professor Claudia Sanchez-Gutiérrez, graduate student Pablo Robles-García, and Mercedes Pérez-Serrano, a language professor in Spain, asked in a recent study.

Irene Ezran (B.A., international relations and Spanish, ’18) has had a lifelong fascination with international politics. With her sights set on a career as a foreign service officer, and with financial support from the Richard and Carolyn Palmer Scholarship, Ezran took her first summer internship at the United Nations. 

Thirteen UC Davis students and alumni have been awarded 2018–19 Fulbright fellowships — the largest group of Aggies ever awarded. Seven of them are recent graduates of the College of Letters and Science.