While you're in Austin, check out some of the sites and events that make UT Austin and Austin such a great place to be. If there's one thing Austin is known for (other than the University), it's live music. For a complete listing of what's playing now, go to http://www.austin360.com/music/content/music/
Austin has a semi-tropical climate with lush vegetation and rolling hills along with the Colorado River and the Highland Lakes. The winter months have an average low temperature of 40° F and high of 61° F, while the spring lows are around 51° F and the highs around 72° F. Things heat up in Austin in the summer with lows averaging 73° F and highs 93° F. Fall is beautiful with lows of 60° and highs averaging 81° F. See today's weather.
What about a walk down the center of campus to talk about the new Speedway project? While you’re on Speedway, cruise by some of the Landmarks art structures. The University has borrowed 28 sculptures from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and you can see them throughout campus. Seventeen large-scale sculptures are already here, with more on the way. Maps are available from the Blanton Museum of Art.
Yoga in the galleries, live music in the atrium, and even a monthly happy hour. You can do it all at the Blanton Museum of Art. With the opening of the Edgar A. Smith Building, the Blanton is the largest university art museum in the country. Now you can take your prospect or donor to lunch in the new 2,500-square-foot café. To make that visit extra special, you can even schedule a tour. Contact Simone Wicha, swicha@mail.utexas.edu, for more details.
The Ransom Center has a little bit of everything. You can see the world’s first photograph, the Watergate papers, and the Gutenberg Bible. You can watch some of Mike Wallace’s best interviews from “60 Minutes.” Arrangements can be made for tours led by docents, staff, or one of the center’s curators. Contact Lisa Avra, lisaavra@mail.utexas.edu, for more information.
Ranger is one of the most powerful academic supercomputer in the United States for open science research — and it’s housed at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) on the J.J. Pickle Research Campus in North Austin. At 579.4 teraflops (a teraflop is 1 trillion floating-point operations per second), Ranger enables groundbreaking research across all scientific disciplines. Ranger will provide more than 500 million processor hours of computing time to the science community each year that it is in operation. To schedule a personal tour, please contact Faith Singer-Villalobos at faith@tacc.utexas.edu.
In October 2008, TACC unveiled one of the world’s most powerful visualization environments in its newly transformed laboratory on the main campus. The TACC Visualization Laboratory (VisLab)—2,900 square feet on the ground floor of the Advanced Computational Engineering and Sciences (ACES) building— is available for researchers who use scientific visualization as part of the discovery process.
To schedule a personal tour, please contact Singer-Villalobos: faith@tacc.utexas.edu.
How about venturing about 20 minutes south of downtown to the beautiful Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center? You can view thousands of native Texas plants and flowers by taking a short stroll throughout the grounds. Spring is bluebonnet time, but wildflowers bloom all year in central Texas. Stop at the café for a light lunch. Contact Terry Quinn at tquinn@wildflower.org for more information.
Some information on this page came fron excerpts of:
Castillo, Derek. "Best prospect destination in Austin? UT campus."
Developing News. December 2008.
