MaterialsInMotion

When I applied to COSMOS, I knew it would be difficult to get in. A four-week residential pre-collegiate summer school, it offers STEM-oriented California high school students the university experience on any of the six following UC campuses: UC Davis, UC Irvine, UC Merced, UC San Diego, UC Los Angeles, and UC Santa Cruz. Each campus is divided into several clusters that each focus on a different STEM subject. Because of my interest in material science, I applied to the Merced campus since it had the most clusters related to material science.

Today is COSMOS move-in day, and I did in fact get accepted—and to my first-choice cluster, too! I’m most excited for the dorm room experience. I’ve never had the experience of being assigned a random roommate, so I’m curious about how that process will go and if we will get along well.

I can’t lie, one of the reasons why I picked the cluster that I got into was because the description said that there would be a popping boba lab—who doesn’t want to spend lab time making a sweet treat that you can eat afterward? However, I was also intrigued by the range of topics that this cluster planned to cover in just four weeks, from everyday materials like metals and alloys to highly specialized fields like nanomaterials and tissue engineering. I’m eager to explore all these different topics and gain a more tangible understanding of what material science really is.