University of California, Merced
ER-12: Sustainability Immersive Experience

CORE is a curricular requirement for all freshmen at UC Merced. A description of the program follows:

The World at Home—Planning for the Future in a Complex World
The CORE Course is future-oriented, striving to help students gain the intellectual tools, knowledge and insights they will need as informed citizens devising future solutions to real-life problems. The UC Merced CORE Course aims to understand the world at large as it is reflected in the world at home—California. By examining, for example, the local evidence of global problems, you will begin to grapple with the issues that will affect you personally and professionally.

CORE 001 will pose a set of questions as they are framed by the various domains of human knowledge known as the disciplines. In CORE 001, UC Merced faculty will introduce you to how their disciplines define the challenges faced by informed citizens of this new century.
For example:
• Can advances in technology mitigate the effects of burgeoning populations and resource depletion?
• How will a changing climate affect the future migration of human populations?
• How do citizens decide among conflicting ethical choices, each with a compelling claim?

Faculty from all three Schools will join together to show how such complex questions might best be probed through connecting the insights of their disciplines.

In the CORE Course, you will:
• work together in groups on joint projects or problems to build your leadership and teamwork abilities;
• learn to think analytically and communicate effectively in the context of problems affecting your lives and futures; and
• use quantitative methods as well as ethical judgment to make decisions and defend those decisions to your peers;