Who's new: Introducing our 2020 incoming graduate student cohort | Graduate Student Resource Center (GradPost)

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UC Santa Barbara welcomes 880 new graduate students at the end of this month. We break down some statistics on this great group and give you a sneak peek at our upcoming series profiling eight of our new students. Read on to learn more!

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UC Santa Barbara welcomes 880 new graduate students at the end of this month. Below, we break down some statistics on this great group and give you a sneak peek at our upcoming series profiling eight of our new students.

Age Pie Chart This month we welcome a diverse new class of graduate students. Coming from around the world and pursuing a huge range of studies, they are a very interesting group! Most incoming graduate students are between the ages of 22 and 30, but our youngest incoming student is 20 years old and our oldest is 67 years old. Nineteen percent are first-generation college students. Below is a breakdown of our incoming domestic students based on the race or ethnicity that they listed when applying to UCSB.

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While we don't have this breakdown of race and ethnicity for our international students, our new graduate students are coming from 43 different countries - from China to Chile, India to Iran, Kazakhstan to Korea - representing nearly every continent. In fact, roughly one-third of incoming students (303, to be exact) are coming from places outside the country.

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Our U.S. students hail from 35 of the 50 states, and 48% of all incoming students are California residents. The most popular disciplines that our new graduate students have chosen are Environmental Science and Management (104 new students), the Teacher Education Program (92 new students), and Computer Science (76 new students). In general, 67% of incoming students are in STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) and 33% of students are in SHEF fields (Social Science, Humanities, Education, and Fine Arts). 54.5% are enrolled in doctorate programs, 45% in masters programs, and 0.5% are pursuing another type of credential.

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We asked several of our new grad students to tell us more about themselves, including what degrees they will be pursuing, what they are looking forward to in graduate school, and some surprising facts about them. Starting next week, we will publish one profile per day up to the first day of classes to celebrate our incoming grads.

Stay tuned to learn more!