University Star

The University Honors Program, along with The Houston-Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation, will sponsor a free Graduate Record Exam strategy session Wednesday, hosted by the Princeton Review.

This is noteworthy on several levels; the most obvious being the GRE is an important exam for those seeking a graduate level education. An opportunity to get inside information from The Princeton Review is definitely not one to be missed.
On another level, the step to prepare students for this gateway to a master’s degree seems part of a larger initiative to ready Texas State students for top graduate schools all over the country. This would get the rest of America, and even the world, looking our way.

If Texas State students are successful and venture off to top graduate programs, it will cause a ripple effect — other universities will take note of Bobcat alumni going off to Yale, Princeton, even Columbia, and they will regard Texas State as a world-class institution that produces students who are well-prepared to take on a bigger pond.

Texas State is moving toward world-class status in more ways than one. We truly practice what we preach. Our Common Experience theme seeps into the research being done with our partnership with MicroPower Global. According to a University Star article, this research uses waste heat from aircrafts and exhaust pipes from vehicles to create energy.  Ravi Droopad, professor in the physics department, said in the article, “We’ve got a system that not many people in the world have … because of the equipment and know-how we have here.”

The advancement of Texas State as an institution is not only noteworthy on a worldly scale, but one that is out of this world, so to speak. The research of Texas State professors and students from the physics department is noted in Sky and Telescope Magazine.
The aforementioned praise and accreditations drive home the fact Texas State is a university that is moving toward a standard of high regard and prestige. If Texas State were a super hero, “unprecedented growth” would be its emblem.

An article from The Texas Tribune by Reeve Hamilton entitled “Texas University Chancellors Brace for Budget Cuts” discusses the cutting of federal funds for universities and how growth in enrollment and graduation rates could remedy this problem. Hamilton states, “If the Texas State University System continues growing at its current rate, it will be 60 percent bigger by 2020.”

Progressive research, rapid expansion and initiatives to mold students who are the crème of the crop researchers and scholars are key ingredients in achieving the status we aim for and deserve. We are aware of what a treasure Texas State is, but it is time to make the rest of the world aware of it, too. The sky is not quite the limit for the rising star of Texas.

— Annie Schultz is an english sophomore