Newsletter for 01/26/2025

New Announcements

Announcements

Key Winter 2025 Deadlines

*Please note the following upcoming university deadlines, and ALWAYS check the official UCSC Academic and Administrative Calendar for important dates and deadlines. Bookmark this year's Academic and Administrative Calendar and refer to it regularly. 

WINTER 2025 DEADLINES:

Saturday January 25th -  Late Add by Permission/Petition Begins: The Add by Petition form requires the signatures of both the instructor and the department adviser and needs to be submitted to the Office of the Registrar for winter 2025.

Thursday March 7th - Deadline for Grade Change Option: This is your last day to change your grading option for any courses you are enrolled in for winter 2025. IMPORTANT: The system defaults to Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory grading.  Instructions for how to change your grading option to letter grades (ABC) can be found here.

Friday March 8th - Deadline for Late Add Permission: Deadline to add a class by permission or petition for winter 2025.

Friday March 21st - Deadline for Removal of Incomplete: Deadline to file petition and submit class work for winter 2025. Graduate Incomplete grade within the last three quarters. 

**Friday March 21st - Deadline for Completing Degree Requirements/Submission: Deadline to complete all degree requirements for winter 2025. *Students participating in commencement need to complete all requirements by May 31 to be listed in the program. 

UCSA & UCGPC Optional Fees

Did you know that you can opt out of the UCSA or UCGPC Association charges by submitting an online form before the third-week deadline of the affected quarter? If you opted out and wish to opt-in, you will need to complete the same form. Follow the navigation below to access the form in your MyUCSC portal.

Instructions:
MyUCSC >> Graduate Student eForms tile >> UCGPC Registration Fee Opt-out link in the left navigation

Reminder: After the third week of instruction (the Add/Drop/Swap Deadline on the Academic and Administrative Calendar) you are no longer able to opt out of the fees for the current quarter, but you may opt out for future quarters. A refund of current fees may be directed to the UCSA or UCGPC.

2025 SFI Education programs for graduate students

The nonprofit Santa Fe Institute (SFI) focuses on research and training in the quantitative modeling of complex systems, including social, cultural, and political systems, and economies. We would be grateful if you could circulate the opportunities below to interested graduate students, postdocs, and other early-career researchers:
 
- Complex Systems Summer School:

• intensive 4-week residential program consisting of seminars, workshops, and group research projects.
• June 8 - July 4, 2025
• For eligibility, cost, and more information: https://santafe.edu/csss
• Application deadline: January 28, 2025: https://apply-sfi.smapply.org/prog/csss2025

- Graduate Workshop in Computational Social Science Modeling & Complexity:

• 2-week residential workshop, where graduate students (2nd year or later) add computational & modeling approaches to their existing thesis research.
• June 22 - July 4, 2025
• For eligibility, cost, and more information: https://santafe.edu/gwcss
• Application deadline February 27, 2025: https://apply-sfi.smapply.org/prog/gwcss2025

**Scholarships are available based on need.

SIP Summer Funding Opportunity: Call for Mentors!

We are actively recruiting graduate students, postdocs, research staff, and faculty across all subjects to serve as Mentors, in-person, for the Summer of 2025. As you plan for this summer, please consider including a few high school students to support your ongoing research. 

ABOUT THE SCIENCE INTERNSHIP PROGRAM (SIP)

SIP engages high school student Interns, ages 14-17, in university-level open-ended research projects in a variety of academic disciplines, including the arts, humanities, and social sciences. SIP Interns work in small groups of three or more, and each group is supervised by a PhD student, postdoc, or research staff Mentor. 

Over the course of the 8-week program, Interns will work on a specific research project under the direct supervision of their Mentor. While advancing their own research, Mentors will also support their Intern's critical and analytical thinking, skill acquisition, and confidence in a research setting.

Visit our 2024 Research Project page for more context about research projects and Intern tasks. We encourage you to watch our short SIP visual story and visit the SIP website to learn more.

TO APPLY:

Please fill out the SIP 2024 Mentor Application to submit your research for consideration for the 2025 program. All 2025 SIP Mentors will need to create an account and password to login (even if you were a SIP mentor in a previous summer).

• Applications Open: January 7, 2025

• APPLICATION DEADLINE: APRIL 15, 2025

STIPEND

This is a 30% appointment with Mentors expected to work 15 hours/week.

• Mentor Advisors (Graduate Students): $5,250

• Graduate Student Mentors: $4,750

• Postdocs, Research Staff Mentors: $2,750 (in lieu of PTO)

• Undergraduate Mentors: $2,750

IMPORTANT DATES

• Mentor Employment Dates: Friday, June 13 - Friday, August 15, 2025

• SIP Program Dates: Monday, June 16 - Saturday, August 9, 2025 

• Saturday, August 9, 2025: Presentation Day

Mentors must be available on campus for the 8-week program (June 16 - August 9), and maintain a minimum attendance of 80% (Monday-Friday). All meetings with Interns, except for the week of June 16, must be conducted in-person. Any time away from the program, with the exception of emergency or illness, must be pre-approved by SIP staff in advance of the appointment start date. Mentors are expected to facilitate Project Meetings at minimum 3 days per week, and work in-person with their Interns at minimum 9 hours per week. 

If you have any questions, please reach out to the SIP staff at hr-crest@ucsc.edu. We look forward to an exciting SIP program this summer!

Writing Support For UCSC Graduate Students!

The Writing Center offers UCSC graduate students one-on-one writing tutoring and supportive writing groups through the VOCES Program.  The VOCES Graduate Student Writing Center is staffed by advanced graduate students who serve as individual tutors and writing group mentors.  Bring us your budding ideas, your developing thoughts, your unpunctuated drafts, or your final polishing needs.  We are here to work with you and provide support for diverse writing needs!

Writing Process:

●      Prewriting

●      Writing

●      Revising

●      Exploring your writing process and understanding your strengths and needs

Academic/Creative Writing

●      Low-Stakes and High-Stakes Assignments

●      Graduate Seminar Papers

●      Proposals and Articles

●      Dissertation Chapters

●      Narrative and Fictional Writing

Professional Writing:

●      Resumes and CVs

●      Personal Statements & Artist Statements

●      Grant and Fellowship Applications

●      National Science Foundation Grant Writing

TO GET WRITING SUPPORT:

• Visit The Writing Center website and learn about us and our services
• Register, schedule an individual tutoring session (use the “VOCES Tutoring for Grad Students WIN2025” schedule)

• To inquire about joining a grad student writing group, email the Writing Center at writeon@ucsc.edu

All services are free, and take place online.  Services may be synchronous (online in real-time) or asynchronous (students submit writing to tutors in advance for review, the tutor then reads the document and provides feedback in writing (email) or in a Zoom meeting conversation. 

Call for Applications: UC HSI DDI Pre-Professoriate Fellows

The 2025-26 UC President’s Pre-Professoriate Fellowship (PPPF) supports PhD students (three per campus each year) who are California HSI alumni and have advanced to candidacy at UC. The fellowship aims to foster their interest and preparation for the professoriate.

The program’s goal is to enhance faculty pathways for historically underrepresented groups, particularly Chicanx/Latinx, African Americans, American Indians/Native Americans, Filipinx, and Pacific Islanders in all disciplines; women in STEM; and Asian Americans in the humanities and social sciences. The intent of the program is to provide fellowships for domestic historically underrepresented minorities from federally-designated California HSIs. For the purposes of this fellowship, AB540 students are eligible. International students are not eligible for this fellowship. Please note: if students were matriculated in HSIs that did not have the federal designation at the time of attendance, they are still considered eligible if the institution is listed on the current list of federally-designated HSIs.

This UC PPPF is only available to UC doctoral students who are matriculated in academic Ph.D. programs and have advanced to candidacy. Professional students (e.g. M.D., J.D.) are not eligible.

A note regarding students receiving a Master’s en route: if a student did not earn a bachelor’s degree from a California HSI, and was not enrolled in a master’s program at a California HSI, but was awarded a master’s degree en route to the Ph.D. (at a UC HSI), that student should NOT be considered eligible for this fellowship. If a student was enrolled in and completed a master’s degree at a California HSI (including a UC HSI), that student is eligible for the fellowship (regardless of whether or not the student completed a bachelor’s degree at a California HSI).

For transfer students from California Community Colleges: Effective January 2022, UCOP has expanded the eligibility of UC PPPF students to include those that transferred to UC from a federally-designated HSI California Community College. In order to qualify, students must demonstrate substantive and significant participation at their HSI CCC by having completed at least 24 semester units (or quarter equivalent). All other criteria/requirements remain and must be met.

Eligibility Criteria

• Must be exceptional students (as demonstrated by their research achievements).

• Must have received their bachelor’s or master’s degree (please see Master’s definitions and criteria above) from a California Hispanic Serving Institution (CA HSI)—public or private. As of January 2022, students that transferred to UC from a federally-designated HSI California Community College are also eligible if the student completed 24 semester units (or quarter equivalent).

• Must have advanced to candidacy prior to being selected for the fellowship.

• Must have letters of support from Faculty Advisor(s) that address the student’s performance and potential as an exceptional academic, and comment on the likelihood that the student will pursue a professoriate path after receiving their Ph.D.

• Must have a demonstrated record of advancing issues of inclusion, equity, and diversity; actively supporting underrepresented communities; and show commitment to pursuing these efforts throughout their career.

If you know of students who meet the eligibility criteria, please encourage them to apply. Interested students should submit the following materials to Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Lorato Anderson (lorato@ucsc.edu) by February 3, 2025:

• Nominee's CV

• Letter of application (2 pages maximum) from the nominee/student that speaks to the eligibility criteria and how much fellowship support the student has received to date

• Letters of support from Faculty Advisor(s) via email to Director of DEI in Graduate Studies Lorato Anderson (lorato@ucsc.edu)

Please see the attached documents for more information, and direct any questions regarding the application process to Lorato Anderson (lorato@ucsc.edu).

Research Intern Training Time Provenance (Data Dignity) | Microsoft Careers

Research Internships at Microsoft provide a dynamic environment for research careers with a network of world-class research labs led by globally-recognized scientists and engineers, who pursue innovation in a range of scientific and technical disciplines to help solve complex challenges in diverse fields, including computing, healthcare, economics, and the environment.

Training-time provenance is a research effort on estimating the influence of specific training data on outputs of large language models (LLMs).

We are attempting to demonstrate that LLMs can be trained in such a way that influence of specific training data on generated outputs can be efficiently and usefully estimated. You can read more about “Data dignity” in the article: There is no A.I. (The New Yorker).

Apply Today!

Qualifications

For this Research Internship (summer 2025), we are seeking PhD students with a passion for fundamental Deep Learning research, particularly those with experience in training LLMs and other large AI models. The Research Intern's responsibilities will include (1) training small language models with novel schemes preserving provenance of data, (2) experimenting with these models to test their performance and reliability. 

• Currently enrolled in a PhD program in Computer Science or a related STEM field. Exceptional candidates enrolled in a master’s program might also be considered.
• At have at least 2 years of research experience, including peer-reviewed publications, researching a topic closely related to the above description, such as natural language processing, deep learning, generative models, approximation methods, etc.

Other Requirements

• Research Interns are expected to be physically located in their manager’s Microsoft worksite location for the duration of their internship.
• In addition to the qualifications below, you’ll need to submit a minimum of two reference letters for this position as well as a cover letter and any relevant work or research samples. After you submit your application, a request for letters may be sent to your list of references on your behalf. Note that reference letters cannot be requested until after you have submitted your application, and furthermore, that they might not be automatically requested for all candidates. You may wish to alert your letter writers in advance, so they will be ready to submit your letter. 

Preferred Qualifications

• Demonstrated ability to develop original research agendas.
• Ability to collaborate effectively with other researchers and product development teams.
• Experience in training large AI models.
• Experience in approximation methods for deep learning systems.
• Proficient interpersonal skills, cross-group, and cross-culture collaboration.
• Ability to think unconventionally to derive creative and innovative solutions.

Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here: https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-intern-pay 

Microsoft accepts applications and processes offers for these roles on an ongoing basis.

Events

2025 UC Santa Cruz Grad Slam - Registration Open

The 2025 UC Santa Cruz Grad Slam will take place on

Saturday, March 1
7:00–9:00 p.m. (Pacific Time)
Kuumbwa Jazz Center

With Live Stream and People’s Choice Voting

Preliminary divisional rounds to determine the finalists will take place the first full week of February at the Graduate Student Commons, 7:00–9:00 p.m. every evening.

• February 3: Social Sciences Division
• February 4: Physical and Biological Sciences Division
• February 5: Humanities Division
• February 6: Baskin School of Engineering
• February 7: Arts Division

Register to participate in your academic division’s preliminary round by completing the form below. The deadline to register for any of the preliminary rounds is January 29, 5:00 p.m. Pacific Time.

https://graduate.ucsc.edu/events/grad-slam/