Scholar, researcher and campus leader Mina Shin ’26 is this year’s recipient of UC Irvine’s Outstanding Undergraduate Student Award.

A political science major, Mina arrived at UC Irvine in 2022 and quickly began exploring questions of race, identity, political expression and memory. Through the Summer Program in Research & Leadership, she found an early mentor in global and international studies professor Long Bui, whose encouragement helped her see herself more confidently as a scholar.

That confidence led to an honors research project examining the children’s books of Los Angeles author and illustrator Leo Politi as radical political texts. She studied how Politi used images of changing neighborhoods, freeways and displacement, as well as emotions including anger and melancholy, to help young readers make sense of larger political forces. The work also connected to Mina’s relationship with Los Angeles and her Zainichi Korean family heritage.

Her scholarship has been matched by her extensive engagement on campus. As a student assistant and lead intern for UC Irvine’s Center for Racial Justice, Mina helped organize programs featuring civil rights leaders and contributed to a Langson Library exhibition marking the 60th anniversary of the Delano grape strike, highlighting Filipino farmworkers, women and children whose roles are often overlooked. 

Mina also worked with local high school students through the Empathy, Connection and Human Outreach Project and participated in Shared Table Perspective, exploring the history of racial equity across the United States.

In recognition of her academic achievement, research, leadership and service, Mina was named to the School of Social Sciences’ 2026 Order of Merit, an honor awarded to approximately 2 percent of its graduating class. She also received a 2026 UC Irvine Chancellor’s Award of Distinction.

In August, Mina began a master’s degree program in library and information science at San José State University, focusing on archival work and imagining a future in museums and curation. She hopes to create spaces that invite visitors to question, explore and form their own interpretations.

This ambition is rooted in an important lesson she says she learned at UC Irvine: Rather than simply adapting herself to the spaces she enters, she can help reshape them – and create new possibilities for others.