Last September, Sarah Gruber and Christopher Brinkley were taking their first steps into college life at The University of Texas at Austin — finding their classes, meeting new friends, exploring the city, and everything else that generations of Longhorns have done in their first year on the Forty Acres.

Both Sarah and Christopher were drawn to UT by the Cockrell School of Engineering, and both enrolled in the Chandra Family Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “I want to do something where I can be hands-on and physically fix and build things,” Christopher says. “To me, that’s the most fun part of engineering.” Sarah is equally hands-on — she built her first computer from scratch at 15 and considers herself the family IT specialist.

That’s not all these promising young engineers have in common. They are also members of a special group of students: the first cohort of the Cockrell School’s Linford Scholars.

Linford Scholars are a group of outstanding, high-potential Texas Engineering students who are Pell Grant-eligible. Nearly 100 first-year students were part of the inaugural cohort of scholars in fall 2022, and as they enter their sophomore years, another cohort of new Linford Scholars are starting their first year at UT.