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Alumni, Welcome Home!
President R. Gerald Turner greets alumni at a
President’s Scholars reunion.
Welcome to the President’s Scholars alumni page. Please send us information and photos of your latest adventures and achievements so that we can share them with your fellow alumni and with current President’s Scholars, who need to know they are following in some mighty footsteps. We can also include the information in the Class Notes section of SMU Magazine, sent free of charge to all alumni twice a year.
SMU is proud of its President's Scholars alumni, who number more than 458 since the program's inception in 1982. They have forged exciting paths for other Scholars to follow in law, medicine, the arts, academe, business, technology, and other disciplines.
SMU President's Scholars have earned advanced degrees from many prestigious graduate, medical, and law schools, including Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Georgetown, Mayo Graduate School of Medicine, Johns Hopkins, Duke, The Julliard School, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Cal Tech, as well as SMU. Scholars have also won Fulbright awards for study in Germany, Mexico City, Ecuador, Singapore, and Austria.
Their ranks include a NASA scientist, symphony musicians and professional actors, an award-winning playwright, and a professional ballet dancer. Others have become lawyers, university professors, doctors, teachers, engineers, economists, financial consultants, print journalists, writers, editors, art historians, and successful entrepreneurs.
Recently, PS Alum Javier J. Aldape ('92) was honored with the 2005 Emerging Leader Award at the SMU Distinguished Alumni Awards. He is currently a national media editor and executive with Tribune Company. Congratulations to Javier!
Let us know your achievements: send us your news to share with fellow alumni through the AlumNews section of SMU Magazine and other communications resources. E-mail Martha Starke at mstarke@smu.edu.
Following are some recent P.S. alumni achievements:
Scott and Tara Norris and their
new daughter Audrey.
An update from the family of Scott Norris (2001 alum):
My wife Tara (class of '03), our daughter Audrey (class of '29?), and I are currently living in Boston. I finished my PhD in applied mathematics at Northwestern University in the fall of 2006, and as of the fall of 2007 I am a "Lecturer on Applied Mathematics" at Harvard -- a two year position that is essentially a research postdoc with some teaching responsibilities. After that I plan to apply for university professor positions -- perhaps I'll end up at SMU!. Tara is a first-year resident in Internal Medicine at the Lahey Clinic in Burlington, and intends to become a hospitalist. Audrey was just born in March, so it's been a memorable year.
Shown here with girlfriend, Marya and PS Alumn, Zack Menendez ('01).
Five years after graduating from SMU, Zuriel Barron (’02) is working with software and Web development at ORIX in Dallas and enjoying SMU football games with his girlfriend, Marya. He is a leader at church, where he plays bass in a group. He hopes soon to have his own band, performing in the meantime with local musicians. Freelancing in programming and Web site-building, Zuriel currently is working on a Web start-up company.
Ashley Denton married Justin McMillian on July 22, 2006. She will start her second year at the University of Texas Law School in the fall of 2007. Ashley is living in Houston this summer working as a clerk at Fulbright and Jaworski, LLP and then as an intern with Federal Magistrate Judge Nancy Johnson.
Lauren Tarbox (2003) will be graduating from University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio in May 08. She plans to look into Internal Medicine Residencies across the U.S. and primarily in Texas.
Read (B.A. ’01) and Vanessa (Rusk) Pierce (B.A. ’00) have moved back to San Francisco, where she is Director of Development for Tipping Point Community, a non-profit venture philanthropy foundation dedicated to fighting poverty in the Bay Area. “I'm excited about my new role after five years in fundraising for academic medical centers in San Francisco and Boston,” Vanessa says. Tipping Point's Web site is www.tippoint.org. As of July Read will be a second-year resident in the Internal Medicine Program at UC-San Francisco. After he completes his training in 2009, he plans to pursue a cardiology fellowship.
Rebekah Hurt with Sir David Manning,
Her Majesty's Ambassador to the United States
The British Embassy, Washington, D.C.
September 2006
Rebekah Hurt, a 2006 President’s Scholar graduate, is doing graduate study in literature at the University of Birmingham, England, under a Marshall Scholarship.
OY! (hello in Brazilian Portuguese) from Emily Gipple,
recent President's Scholar graduate!
Emily's real-life adventure: THE HUNT FOR THE JACARES (Brazilian crocodiles) The dramatic and action-filled adventure of how Emily, a wide-eyed "americaninha," travels deep into the sub-amazonian swamp, driven by one goal: to eat a jacare. She hikes through puma-infested swamps with machetes, sneaks along in night safaris surrounded by the glowing orange eyes of the myriad crocodiles lurking all around her, and even floats in inner tubes (Guadalupe river style) to get close to them.
President’s Scholar graduate
Wrenn Schmidt has made her television debut with a speaking role on “Law and Order” (November 10), followed by an appearance on the new CBS medical drama, “3lbs” (November 28). And she will serve as an understudy for the national tour of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”
Here’s the news from Wrenn, in her own words:
I had my New York stage debut in my first Off-Broadway production, “Crazy for the Dog,” at the Jean Cocteau Repertory Theatre in June. That production was extended through the end of August. We got a wonderful New York Times review! A manager came to see that production and took an interest in me...and that's when the stars aligned. He sent me out on my first big audition, which was for the first national tour of the Broadway production, “Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”. (The tour visits the Kennedy Center in Washington DC, the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles, and theatres in Chicago, San Francisco, and Tucson. After three auditions, I found myself in a room with Jay Binder of Jay Binder Casting (a big wig in the league of big wig casting directors), Anthony Page (Tony award-winning director and director of the production, and Edward Albee, playwright. The following day I found out I landed the understudy for Honey. That very same day, I worked as a reader for another casting director for the new CBS show "3 lbs". The director for that episode called me in the next day to read for a small (very small) speaking role. The following day I was cast! The managers who sent me out asked me to sign with them after that same week. A week later we shot the episode (so fascinating to see how it all works). A few weeks later I had an audition for NBC's "Law & Order". They called me in for one part, but after the producers heard me read, they asked me to read for another. Two days later we filmed my scene. (The episode aired November 10.)
And the latest (as of November 15):
You've seen me forehead act with gusto now (“She's the most honest person I ever met.”) on Law and Order. I swear, if they gave out awards for that, I'd be taking home an Oscar, Grammy, and Pulitzer. Maybe Nobel?
Now, it's time to see me play with my hair on national television. It was a tough shtick to come up with, but I was trained by the best! Check it out on CBS’s new medical drama, “3lbs.” My episode airs (supposedly) on Tuesday, November 28 at 10 p.m. Eastern standard time.
| Class according to Graduation Year | ||||
| 1986 | 1990 | 1994 | 1998 | 2002 |
| 1987 | 1991 | 1995 | 1999 | 2003 |
| 1988 | 1992 | 1996 | 2000 | 2004 |
| 1989 | 1993 | 1997 | 2001 | 2005 |
| 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | ||
