Great rankings, scholarship recipients, a conference championship, and a historic win mean more opportunities to showcase our Comet pride. Here's a quick rundown on some of the best of UT Dallas this spring.

Did you know that Kiplinger's Personal Finance ranked UT Dallas among the top 50 "best value" public colleges in the nation? Our audiology program is also ranked 4th in the nation, our MBA and graduate engineering programs are both ranked 1st in North Texas and 4th in Texas, according to U.S. News and World Report, and the Association for Computing Machinery ranks the UT Dallas computer science program third in the state and 29th nationally. 

Rachel Markowitz (B.A. '08) is UT Dallas' first undergraduate recipient of the prestigious Fulbright scholarship, which covers housing, travel and educational expenses for nine months of study abroad. Read more about her in this month's Alumni Spotlight.

UT Dallas undergraduate Austin Swafford became the second student in UT Dallas history to receive a Goldwater award, which he plans to use to further his cancer research studies, and undergraduate Molly Wurzer received the U.S. State Department's Competitive Language scholarship to study Arabic in Tunisia. Read more about both students in this month's Around Campus section.

The UT Dallas chess team retained its title of Intercollegiate Chess Champion of the Final Four, and made history in the process at this year's Final Four of Chess championship at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, on April 6. The UT Dallas team is the only collegiate chess team to ever win both the Final Four of Chess and the Intercollegiate Pan-American tournament for two consecutive years.

UT Dallas Athletics has only been around for a decade, but in those 10 years we've built an impressive record among NCAA Division III schools. Our men's soccer team won this year's American Southwest Championship (ASC) tournament in November, sending the Comets to the NCAA Division III national tournament. It was our sixth consecutive year in the ASC tournament.

I'm sharing all of this with you so you can share it with others.  It's your turn now to show your pride in our alma mater.  If you haven't been back to campus in a while, give us a call and schedule a tour. Great things are happening here! 

Erin Dougherty, '03 and '07
Director of Alumni Relations and Annual Giving