Message From the Dean

I am happy to again be writing to you from campus after COVID-19’s many challenges. Faculty and staff came back to the school last summer, and we regained a firm footing this fall.

Return of students, record freshman enrollment, higher rankings, several awards, launch of a new undergraduate program and a new center of excellence all make for happy news. We enrolled 801 freshmen — the most ever — this fall, and we enrolled the most transfer students for a single semester, 579. This tells me undergraduate students are eager to be at the Jindal School.

High school students also seem to be thinking about being here, based on an enrollment milestone reached by our Jindal Young Scholars Program. JYSP is a partnership between the Jindal School and the Dallas Independent School District to improve high school students’ readiness for collegiate and career success. This fall, JYSP recruited 536 students — a record number — to take part in postsecondary preparatory programs, including free ACT and SAT sessions, on their high school campuses.

We continue to get excellent news on the rankings front. U.S. News & World Report recently ranked our bachelor’s degree programs at No. 10 among public universities. Other recent MBA rankings from Bloomberg Businessweek showed the school ranked No. 11 among public universities. That was impressive, but what was especially pleasing was that we excelled in two of the ranking component categories, placing at No. 1 in learning and No. 4 in networking.

Among important developments are a new undergraduate program in business analytics and a new Center for Retail Innovation and Strategy Excellence. Both these additions will provide us the ability to stay on the cutting edge of business education.

Congratulations are due to a number of Jindal School educators, including Associate Dean Diane McNulty, who earned a Lifetime Achievement Award from the DFW Alliance of Technology and Women; Dr. Naim Bugra Ozel, who Poets & Quants recognized as one of the Best 40-Under-40 MBA Professors of the Year; and Mary Beth Goodrich, named as an Accounting Educator of the Year by the Texas Society for Certified Public Accountants after earlier earning a UT Dallas President’s Excellence in Teaching Award.

Our programs also recently have earned awards. I was pleased to see that the BS in Marketing program earned a Corporate Social Responsibility Award from the Dallas-Fort Worth chapter of the American Marketing Association for efforts to help nonprofits during the pandemic. And our development and external relations teams earned the Marketing Event of Year Award from the association for making Scholarship Breakfast, our annual major fundraiser, a success in 2020 despite the pandemic.

Undoubtedly, the best part of being back on campus is once again interacting in person with our students, whose energy and enthusiasm are — happily — contagious. Undeterred by COVID, they have been performing at a high level, as exemplified by junior Jasmine Nguyen, who the local chapter of the American Marketing Association recently chose as Collegiate Marketer of the Year; Professional MBA Evening Cohort member Mercedes Johnson, who recently picked up the $15,000 check that came with being named a 2021 Texas Business Hall of Fame Foundation Scholar; and Management Science PhD candidate Jiapeng He, whose scholarly efforts earned him a Best Paper Award at the American Accounting Association Annual Meeting.

Over the years, your unwavering support has made it possible for us to excel. In the coming year, we will once again rely on your support for a new capital campaign, New Dimensions: The Campaign for UT Dallas. Ron Nash, a Jindal School MS’79 alumnus who has been a UT Dallas stalwart since almost the day he graduated, is co-chairing this effort to raise $750 million, and one of its priorities is to endow scholarships that will keep attracting the kind of students I have just mentioned. We could not have gotten this far without you, and we will once again need your help. Thank you on behalf of all of us, and I know we can count on your continued support.

Best Wishes,

Hasan Pirkul
Dean and Caruth Chair