Student Shoutouts

From the top of the Tower to global competitions, McCombs students make their mark

Networking With the Top Dog
This year’s National Pet Day brought McCombs students, staff, faculty and parents together at the GSB Plaza for conversations with Dean Lillian Mills and a study break with her dog, Reacher, as the end of the spring semester approached.

Creative Problem-Solving
Texas Enactus, a UT team that included McCombs first-year students Maria Cavazos and Abhinav Yarlagadda, led by adviser Dennis Passovoy, assistant professor of instruction, placed second in the nation for their project, Rainewable, a rainwater catchment system deployed in rural Nicaragua. All Enactus teams focus on using business concepts and principles to solve today’s social problems. Each year, students from these teams make presentations about their biggest and most impactful projects to a panel of judges in the hope of winning the Expo competition. The UT team was invited to advance to the global competition and will present their project at the Enactus World Cup in Utrecht, Netherlands, on
Oct. 17–20.

First Year, First Presentation
Gordon Leeroy, a first-year student in accounting, gave a joint presentation at the AAA 2023 Joint Midyear Meeting of the AIS, SET, and International Sections in Las Vegas. He co-authored a paper titled “Impact of Blockchain on Improving Taxpayers’ Compliance: Empirical Evidence from Panel Data Model and Agent-Based Simulation” with University of Maryland Global Campus professor Eugene Lee. The paper is forthcoming in the Journal of Emerging Technologies in Accounting (JETA). The paper explores the
impact of blockchain technology applications on taxpayer compliance and identifies the pivotal factors that affect blockchain technology applications in the tax compliance system. “I believe that technology and artificial intelligence are the future,” Leeroy says. “The model I used in the presentation and paper was an agent-based simulation model for a new tax system powered by artificial intelligence.”

Tunes From the Tower
From behind the clock face high atop the UT Tower, Justin Zhang, a graduating senior in finance in the Canfield Business Honors Program, played the carillon in April as part of the Spring Concert by the UT Guild of Carillonneurs. “Being able to have a common language between all these different students and even faculty and staff, maintaining that school spirit and tradition that’s been happening for over 100 years now, it’s just really valuable and the biggest reason I do this,” Zhang says. “The bells are
something you can’t find anywhere else.”

This story appeared in the Fall 2023 issue of McCombs magazine.