Who's new: Introducing our 2023 incoming graduate student cohort

UC Santa Barbara welcomes 777 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 8 of these new students.

This month we welcome a diverse new class of graduate students. Coming from around the world and pursuing a wide range of studies, they are a fascinating group! Most of our incoming graduate students are between the ages of 22 and 30, but 4 new students are 20 years old and 55 are 21 years old. Our oldest new student is 69. Twenty one percent are first-generation college students.

Below is a breakdown of our incoming students based on the race or ethnicity that they listed when applying to UCSB. *Please note that this data was collected by the Registrar's Office when students applied to UCSB so there are limitations on how representative this data is. If you do not see your ethnicity reflected here, please reach out to us (GSRC@ucsb.edu) and contact the Registrar's Office.

Our new graduate students are from 48 different countries - from Bangladesh to Brazil, Colombia to Croatia, Eritrea to Egypt, Macau to Malaysia, Spain to Sri Lanka, Turkey to Taiwan- representing nearly every continent. In fact, over one-third (37%) of incoming students are coming to UCSB from international locations.

Our U.S. students hail from 32 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 (124 new students), the Teacher Education Program (77 new students), Computer Science (74 new students), and Electrical and Computer Engineering (68 new students). Overall, 70% of incoming students are in STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) and 30% of students are in SHEF fields (Social Science, Humanities, Education, and Fine Arts).

We asked 8 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 fun facts about them. Starting next week, we will publish one profile per day leading up to the first day of classes to celebrate our incoming grads.

Stay tuned to learn more!

Welcome to all of our amazing grads!