Honesty Cohort

Geneva “Neva” Cline

Aidan Cournoyer

Kiera Dixon

Geneva “Neva” Cline

Liberal Arts Honors, Government

This was a year of firsts for me, and I could not be happier that it was. My junior year introduced new experiences and activities I could never have imagined before.

I started the year by spending my fall semester in London, studying at University College London in the uniquely formulated Bachelor of Arts and Sciences department. There, I split my time between studying subjects like British Politics and Russian and soaking up history first-hand. While abroad, I was able to visit eleven countries and immerse myself in different cultures I would never have been able to experience without the support of the Dedman Distinguished Scholars Program.

Once back at UT in spring, I continued to be active with the Clements Center for National Security and the Intelligence Studies Project. Additionally, I was invited to become a founding member of the UT Undergraduate Strategy Team, which attended a strategy competition held at the University of South Florida in April. I am proud to have coordinated this from the student-side.

Over the summer of 2026, I was accepted to and began attending the Summer Language Workshop in Russian at Indiana University. As I write this, I am nearing the end of the program and have learned the equivalent of over a year of Russian in less than two months. I am pleased to have a new language to add to my studies of Spanish, French, Italian, Hungarian, Braille, and ASL.

For this upcoming year, I am happy to announce that I will be returning as a Senior Undergraduate Fellow with the Clements Center. I will also be joining the ISP-associated Tearline Project as a Student Editor for the Russia and Eastern Europe Pod. Additionally, I will continue to work as an Undergraduate Grader for the American Government course at UT as I pursue opportunities for after my undergraduate career. Finally, I will be working on my Honors Thesis, focused on the intersection of early developments in Radio Direction Finding and Signals Intelligence. As always, I will be making music and items of clothing in whatever spare time I can find.

Going into my final year at UT, I am thankful for the friends I have made and the advice I have been given. I am forever grateful to the Dedman Distinguished Scholars Program for giving me the freedom to explore my interests and completely change my trajectory for the better.

Aidan Cournoyer

Liberal Arts Honors, Government, Behavioral and Social Data Science B.S.

I sat down in Zilker Elementary’s reading room for my first lesson with Maria, pulling a carefully prepared set of flashcards from my bag. Surrounded by the library’s shelves, however, her eyes darted from cover to cover. While she was still practicing English pronunciation, I realized the lesson I had planned was not how she wanted to be taught. I reached for a bilingual picture book. I did not change what I hoped to teach, but I let her curiosity lead me.

That morning confirmed what I had begun to understand while studying abroad at Oxford: learning is shaped not only by what students are taught, but by whether they find a reason to care. With Maria, I could create that reason by attending closely to one student. In a classroom of twenty or more, the problem becomes harder: how do teachers cultivate that same ownership at scale?

In the Science of Learning and Metacognition Lab, I have studied why students choose particular learning strategies and begun an honors thesis examining how learning objectives shape engagement. Through UTeach and leading the Austin branch of UPchieve, I watched those theories meet elementary and middle school students whose interests, confidence, and circumstances could not be addressed through any single intervention. Earning my Cambridge CELTA certification further challenged me to adapt instruction across unfamiliar linguistic and cultural contexts. Helping redesign the teacher training for UT’s Pre-Health Certificate pushed the question further. New instructors needed more than content knowledge; they had to reconsider what teaching required of them. Across these settings, I became less interested in isolated techniques than in the systems that determine whether teachers and students can use them well.

I now see the classroom as a reflection of everything surrounding it: the preparation teachers receive, the support schools can offer, and the policies that determine whether educators have the freedom to build. At Educate Texas, synthesizing research on teacher preparation and support showed me how those systems are constructed on paper. Sitting in on the Teaching and Learning Council, where superintendents and veteran teachers described how policy decisions reached their classrooms, made their consequences concrete. Through Austin ISD’s Advocacy Advisory Committee and my work chairing the City of Austin’s College Student Commission, I have continued exploring those conditions from different angles.

I do not yet know whether this question will lead me back to teaching, deeper into research, or further into education policy. I know only that I want to understand how schools develop students who continue learning when no one forces them to. The Dedman Distinguished Scholars Program has given me the freedom to pursue that question across disciplines and institutions, alongside people whose curiosity continually inspires my own: Drew, whose encouragement during a walk around Mueller Lake led me to join Texas 4000; Cass, Neva, and Jess, as we planned this year’s Senior Send-Off; and a new cohort of first-years already asking many of the questions I once did.

Kiera Dixon

Liberal Arts Honors, Government

This summer, more than ever, I’ve found myself looking back at my time at UT, tracing the steps of my journey here that I never could have predicted from where I started.

I first came to UT the spring of my senior year of high school for a completely different scholarship program. I hadn’t yet decided on UT, and visiting the Forty Acres left me completely overwhelmed. I’d graduated high school in a class of forty people, and at UT I saw thousands of strangers, a campus I couldn’t navigate without Google Maps, and complete uncertainty about my future. I also realized that I had messed up my application into the Liberal Arts Honors program, but Stacey Amorous, an incredible LAH advisor, reopened it so that I could enter the program. She told me that she had only done so for one other student, who later became wildly successful at UT. That one gracious act changed my life.

At LAH orientation, before freshman year had even officially begun, I met Jaden Watt, another Dedman who happened to be in my same orientation session. Not long after, I sat in the crowd at Gone to Texas and watched the sitting Student Body President and Vice President speak to the massive crowd of first-year students. I remember thinking “That could be me one day.” Soon after, I decided to put my all into applying for this program- another opportunity only available to me because of LAH.

Every step after that led me to junior year, when Jaden and I acted on an insane idea we had begun building since our freshman year: run for Student Body President and Vice President together. At every point along the way, Dedmans were there. Devon Stevenson, another Dedman, ran our campaign and now serves as our Chief of Staff. The Dedman lounge became our unofficial campaign headquarters. It was the place where we cut flyers, practiced speeches, and picked each other up. At debates and tabling shifts, there was always a familiar Dedman face in the crowd. When we sat down to write policy, it was Dedmans who helped pressure-test our ideas and sharpen our thinking.

Representing over 55,000 students is not a responsibility I take lightly, and being chosen for it is still, months later, hard to fully put into words. The campaign taught me so much, from being able to talk to other Longhorns that I never would have met otherwise about the issues they face on campus, to the lack of sleep, to the discipline of giving everything you have and never giving up, every single day, until the votes came in. We won. I am enormously proud of that. I am even more grateful for it.

This past year also gave me the J.J. Pickle Research Fellowship, where I built and executed a year-long independent research project examining crisis governance in the U.S. and U.K. and measuring whether governmental attention to crisis-relevant policy domains persists beyond the emergency or snaps back to a pre-crisis equilibrium once it passes. It was some of the most rewarding intellectual work I’ve done at UT: learning to move between qualitative and quantitative research, being mentored by people who pushed me to ask sharper questions, and getting the chance to bring that research to Washington, D.C. It reshaped how I understand policy and gave me invaluable skills and connections that I will build upon far after my time at UT.

Looking back over all of it, Dedman’s impact on my experience at this university has been ever-present. Not just as a scholarship, but as a genuine community: one that showed up for me, supported my goals, and helped me actually reach them.

I’ve spent this summer serving as Student Body President, continuing our work to create lasting change on the Forty Acres, sitting down with administrators to turn campaign promises into policy with teeth, and constantly prioritizing the student voice and experience. In whatever pockets of free time I could find, I did what I love most: I traveled. New York, Canada, Mexico, and, in a trip I never would have predicted a year ago, Starkville, Mississippi, for the SEC Exchange, sitting alongside student government leaders from every school across the conference and realizing how much we all can learn from one another.

Now, looking ahead, senior year feels like the most rewarding chapter yet. As Student Body President, I’m determined to keep pushing for real, lasting change across UT- the kind that outlasts a single administration. I’m also honored to have been accepted into the Texas Trailblazers Leadership Program- a cohort of student leaders from across campus, all working on Capstone Projects meant to leave UT better than we found it. It is an incredible opportunity to learn alongside peers who are equally relentless about their own corners of campus, and under the mentorship of inspiring leaders like Gay Gaddis. I’m excited to grow as a leader as this year asks more of me than any before it.

There’s a part of me that isn’t ready to leave, that wants to hold onto every last piece of this place a little longer. But I know the next chapter, whatever it holds, will be full of its own adventures, built on everything the Forty Acres taught me, and everything that the Dedman program made possible. I am endlessly grateful.