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Campus to Welcome Newest McDermott Scholars This Fall

The UT Dallas McDermott Scholars Program has selected 25 students to make up the 2014 incoming class.

The entering cohort, the program’s 14th class, was selected from nearly 1,600 high school students from 36 states and four countries who had initially expressed interest in the program. Fifty-nine applicants were invited to the annual finalists weekend from which the scholars were selected.

The incoming class includes 14 students from Texas. Eleven others come from 10 states, from California to New Jersey. Collectively, this class has an average two-part SAT score of 1545. Nine of them achieved perfect scores on the SAT or ACT. Twenty-two have been recognized by the National Merit Scholarship program, 10 were high school valedictorians and three were salutatorians.

“UT Dallas is growing in exciting directions, and the McDermott Scholars Program’s development mirrors that trend of success,” said Molly Seeligson, director of the program. “We are attracting more and more top-quality applicants to our school with each passing year, and I am excited to see what our newest class is capable of in the classroom, on campus and out in the community.”

The McDermott Scholars will have their educational expenses — including tuition and fees, stipends for living expenses and books, travel and post-graduation preparation — covered for the next four years and will participate in a variety of cultural and educational enrichment experiences in the Dallas area and beyond.

The McDermott Scholars Program is designed to incorporate experiential learning:

  • Freshman year includes an orientation trip to Santa Fe, N.M., weekly leadership development seminars and a trip to Washington, D.C., for an immersion in government operations.
  • During their sophomore year, scholars take leading roles on campus, and experience state and local government during a trip to the Capitol in Austin.
  • Junior year is focused on study abroad and/or internships.
  • Senior year centers on final preparations for the next phase of scholars’ lives and includes traditions such as a class retreat, capstone service projects and the passing of the McDermott Scholars Program torch in the “Lighting the Legacy” ceremony.

The incoming group will join the 64 scholars already at UT Dallas. The program has 159 alumni.

The McDermott Scholars Program was made possible by a $32 million gift from Margaret McDermott, wife of the late Eugene McDermott, one of the co-founders of Texas Instruments. McDermott and two TI co-founders, Cecil Green and J. Erik Jonsson, founded the research institution that in 1969 became UT Dallas.

Those selected as McDermott Scholars for the 2014 entering class are listed in the source of this article.

Source: News Center