If you could start a political science program from scratch, how would you do it? Given no institutional history, how would you design graduate and undergraduate programs? How would you grow your faculty? How would you attempt to build a reputation in the absence of a reputation at time t-1? In an interdisciplinary environment, with which disciplines would you work most closely? For most political science professors, these might be interesting hypothetical questions to consider. For the two of us, these questions are very real and have dominated our recent work lives as we have just finished our first year as the founding political science faculty at the brand new University of California campus, UC Merced.We thank Carissa Hansford, Shawn Kantor, and Jennifer Nicholson for helpful comments and suggestions.