certain outstanding minority students with financial need. Mee's scholarship is helping her throughout her undergraduate education and will support her in her graduate studies as well. Winning a Gates Millennium Scholarship is a special honor, since only 1,000 students in the U.S. are chosen for the scholarship each year.

Mee is glad that she chose the game design major, which she declared as soon as it was available. "I really enjoy my work because I get to express myself and exercise my creativity," she says. "Also, the other students are very welcoming, and we get to know each other because we work together in small groups."

For example, Mee is currently working on a year-long project with a group of about six other students. The ultimate result will be a new, 2D platformer game (a game in which characters jump to and from suspended platforms, like Mario games) for Nintendo DS. They are building the entire game from scratch. "I love it – it's whimsical," she says. "It's exciting to see what you're working on and view it as it takes shape. That is instant gratification."

Mee says that the students in the program tend not to produce violent games. "Some of the projects are darker, but generally we are creating games for a wider, family audience," she says.

The game design major was one of the reasons Mee chose UCSC. "I heard that game design was going to become part of the curriculum, and that was exciting for me, since most of academia doesn't recognize game design as a discipline yet," she says.

In addition, the physical environment made her feel at home, with the ocean and redwood forests, which resemble Humboldt County, where she's from. "I wanted a place where I felt comfortable, but that was away from home so I could feel like an adult," she says. "This campus was perfect."

The professors and students have also helped make Mee feel at home, even though there aren't many other women in the game design major as of yet. "The best things about UCSC are the people -- the faculty and friends. It's hard for me to imagine my life without them now. They're so helpful, friendly, and reliable. They say you'll make friends for life at college, and that's definitely true of UCSC," she says.

Mee's extracurricular activities include serving as the webmaster for the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) and the Public Relations Officer for the Hmong Student Association, biking, drawing, playing games, and crafting. Mee particularly praises the SWE: "They are very supportive and friendly," she says.

After graduation, Mee plans to either work in a game company or attend graduate school for an M.A. in education and a teaching credential. She would like to encourage more instruction in computer science and programming at the secondary level and is considering making a contribution in that area.

Mee is pictured in the undergraduate Game Design Studio, which contains high-end computer game development workstations, playing stations, and development kits.