Students

Landon Watson, who will graduate with his bachelor's degree in electrical and computer engineering this spring, discusses his time in the Cockrell School of Engineering and Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, what led him to engineering and to UT Austin specifically, and where he's headed after graduation.

Every once in a while, a young person already so accomplished comes along and makes you wonder aloud “what am I doing with my life?” Siddharth Thakur is one of those young people. Even in the sea of brilliant future engineers at the Cockrell School, the 17-year-old stands out. 

With more students than ever graduating on time, The University of Texas at Austin has been able to expand capacity, admitting its largest-ever incoming class. The university has 9,060 first-time freshmen undergraduates, according to data collected on the 12th class day of this semester. The previous high for the entering first-year class was 8,960 in 2018. Total university enrollment rose 3% over last year from 50,476 to 51,992, which is close to the all-time high of 52,261 set in 2002.

A team of Texas Engineering undergraduate students took a colorful approach to the 2021 Cornell Theme Park Design Competition and won two out of five competition categories, placing second overall. Kendall Duggar, Katie Kahoutek, Olivia Pierce and Scia Verma, all mechanical engineering students and members of the Texas Theme Park Engineering Group, developed everything from the park’s technologies to its master plan and layout.

The University of Texas at Austin’s Center for Dynamics and Control of Materials (CDCM), a National Science Foundation Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC), is partnering with Texas State University to establish the Center for Intelligent Materials Assembly. The new center is being developed through an NSF Partnerships for Research and Education in Materials (PREM) grant.

The Cockrell School of Engineering’s Texas Rocket Engineering Lab (TREL) is one step closer to the edge of space following the successful liquid hot-fire test of their liquid bi-propellant rocket, Halycon. This milestone moves TREL toward their goal of becoming the first-ever student team to design, build and launch a liquid-propellant rocket to the Karman Line.

Despite one of the most challenging years of their academic careers, the Texas Engineering Class of 2021 persisted and persevered to finish their final year. On Friday, May 21, hundreds of Texas Engineering students crossed the stage with friends and families in tow for our Graduate Recognition Moments, held in the Engineering Education and Research Center. While not our conventional commencement ceremony, the atrium was filled with excitement and pride from all members of our community.

Katharine Fisher is this year's Outstanding Scholar-Leader for the Cockrell School of Engineering — an award that recognizes one graduating student annually for hard work and leadership inside and outside the classroom. However, things may have been very different had she not decided to check out an engineering outreach program on a whim in high school. The California-born, Texas-raised Fisher was always interested in building things and solving hard problems as a kid, a staple of the engineer's brain. But her early schooling did little to encourage this mindset, and slowly her interest in engineering and science drifted away.

This week, students at The University of Texas at Austin will be able to talk with and learn from three Nobel Laureates, who are among the world’s top scientists, in a free virtual event April 21-22. The Nobel Prize Inspiration Initiative is a global program that seeks to bring Nobel Prize winners in closer contact with the larger scientific community, particularly younger scientists. Students from neighboring universities and from public schools are also invited. This is the first time the event has been held at UT Austin. Since the initiative’s inception in 2010, events have been held at 30 universities on four continents.

Catherine Dominic, a sophomore aerospace engineering major from Sugarland, Texas, was selected to receive a Brooke Owens Fellowship for 2021. Dominic joins two former students in the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics to receive the award — Josefina Salazar in 2018 and Mykaela Dunn in 2019.

For the first time at UT, student organizations and programs focused on women in STEM fields are coming together in a formal group led by the Cockrell School of Engineering’s Women in Engineering Program (WEP). The Women in STEM Leadership Collaborative includes 1,000+ women from 24 organizations across engineering and sciences at UT to collaborate, share resources and participate in leadership development opportunities, mentorship programs and other activities.

When brother and sister Krishan and Koushalya Sachdev witnessed their 23-year-old cousin’s adjustment to life as a paraplegic after suffering a traumatic accident, they wanted to do everything they could to help him.

To be an undergraduate student in the Cockrell School of Engineering means you are opening doors for your future as you pursue a degree that will help you impact society and change the world. It also means that for the length of time it takes to complete said world-changing degree, you are BUSY.

Henry Rossiter was planning the trip of the lifetime when the COVID-19 pandemic began sweeping across the United States, forcing people into isolation. It was one of the many things in his life upended by the virus. A UT computational engineering senior, Rossiter, 21, had planned to spend the summer mountain biking, completing an engineering internship and celebrating his last year in college. It didn’t turn out that way.

Students, faculty, staff and leadership from academic institutions across the U.S., including The University of Texas at Austin, came together this month in a virtual event to share experiences and barriers facing Black scholars in STEM fields. Hosted by the University of Washington, “Experiences of Black STEM in the Ivory: A Call to Disruptive Action” inspired and challenged participants to take action to address racial inequalities in STEM.

Most humans will never set foot on the moon, but a group of students from the Cockrell School of Engineering have an intriguing idea to let anyone make their mark there. The project, a rover that could write short messages on the surface of the moon, was recently recognized as part of a NASA design contest.

When UT operations research and industrial engineering graduate student Kyoung Kim approached his professors in 2017 with an idea to use logistics to help with disaster planning, he had no idea the biggest disaster in a century would, in a few months, ravage the Texas coast.

Chloe Johnson pivoted between three computer monitors alongside fellow graduate student, Patrick Mortimer, as she powered the rotor testing rig, tucked away in a non-descript hangar on UT Austin’s J.J. Pickle Research Campus. The adjoining room soon filled with the glow of green lasers, perfectly placed to capture the rate at which particles from a fog machine illuminated by lasers pass through two propeller blades – data that will be crucial to the future of urban air mobility.

Class of 2020 mechanical engineering graduate Tyson Smiter, who has been heavily involved in student organizations and committed to his academics since he joined the Cockrell School of Engineering, has been named this year’s Outstanding Scholar-Leader. Every year, the Cockrell School selects an Outstanding Scholar-Leader from among the senior class, recognizing a candidate whose hard work and dedication, both in and out of the classroom, exemplify leadership and inspire our community. The student must have completed at least 60 credit hours at UT Austin and maintained at least a 3.8 in-residence GPA.

Luca Tomescu has never waited for anyone to make him feel at home in a new place. That’s a product of his outgoing and ambitious personality and his early history. Born in Romania, Tomescu moved seven times as a young boy, including to America’s West Coast, the Midwest, and to Houston. “I think through that experience, I learned that it’s really up to you to create your own sense of community. It’s up to you to make a place feel like home.”