Author: Josh Siatkowski

The competition, in which students propose startup ideas rooted in the world’s favorite two-letter acronym, saw pitches across a wide spectrum of industries. Students presented search engine optimization businesses, disaster response ventures and even a technology that turned video of ocean waves into random cryptographic sequences.

The McBride Center of International Business is taking applications for its new Embedded Development through Global Engagement program this spring. Students can earn three credit hours in a class centered on a trip to one of three destinations, two of which are new; they include Munich, Germany, Lisbon, Portugal and Mongolia.

St. Peter, a ministry of the Diocese of Austin, opened in 1999 and launched a $10 million campaign late last month to build a new 450-seat chapel. The facility will connect to the current student center on 9th Street and, along with the new chapel, will update the current church offices and add a new narthex.

Baylor’s chapter of Ratio Christi, a nationwide Christian apologetics organization, planned to host its keynote fall event this past Monday in Waco Hall, featuring Ratio Christi CEO Dr. Corey Miller and Dr. Frank Turek, founder of Cross Examined, another Christian apologetics group. When security costs came in higher than the group expected in the days before the event, and marketing was limited because the event was designated “expressive” under Baylor Student Activities policy, Ratio Christi postponed the event over the weekend.

“Blake is just an incredible guy,” Marshall McDuffie, Driskell’s cousin and a 2024 Baylor graduate, said. “He’s just such a good human being. He was really soft-spoken, but he was so outgoing. He was so kind. He was caring. He was really, really hardworking.”

Ever since I came from Oklahoma City to Baylor in 2023, I’ve noticed a hole in the “Grease Pit” of fast food restaurants on the other side of the highway. It’s a hole that can only be filled by something as Oklahoman as me: Braum’s Ice Cream and Dairy Store.

Thursday’s groundbreaking marks the physical beginning of the 12-20-year Waco Downtown Redevelopment Project, which will repurpose more than 100 acres of riverfront land to create a new city hall, an arts district, a sports entertainment complex and more.

Over their nearly 50-year friendship, Baylor film professors Dr. Corey Carbonara and Dr. Michael Korpi have always sat on the cutting edge of media technology. One of their latest projects is no different, developing into a business with nearly $10 million in investor funding, over 140 patents and — if things play out right — a revolution in the way the world sees color.

When most Baylor students eat Chick-fil-A on campus, they’re served by staff in the Bill Daniel Student Center. For the lucky ones who attend the business school’s “Nugget Pop-Ups,” that server becomes Dean David Szymanski. But yesterday, Szymanski took it up a notch by inviting Chick-fil-A Chairman Dan Truett Cathy to campus, where the chicken restaurant’s lead man took on a job well below his qualifications: handing out nuggets to hungry business students with a smile and a “my pleasure” each time.

Work began at the end of last month and is expected to be completed sometime this spring. While Baylor’s live mascots, American black bears Indy and Belle, will spend time at their off-campus site during some parts of the project, Associate Director of Student Activities and Director of Baylor Chamber of Commerce Dr. Austin Smith said that they’ll be around as much as possible, especially for some big weekends coming up.

Opened in 1994, the shop has become a local icon. Started by Jill Barrett over 30 years ago, Blake Batson and his wife Kimberley — both Baylor alumni — acquired the business in 2012. Since then, they have expanded the original store on 8th Street to four locations in McLennan County: one in the Bill Daniel Student Center, one on Franklin Ave and another in Woodway.

In his life, Carlos Colón has been many things: a refugee, a musician, a Catholic, a Baptist and a Catholic again, to name a few. He has seen more hurt than most, but he’s passionately faithful. When he recounts some of his experiences, he’s drawn back to something his pastor showed him as a boy while growing up in El Salvador.

As the church transitions, so too does the community around it. By summer 2028, Baylor will gain new off-campus housing for hundreds of students as Parallel and Deven Group lead a group of development companies on construction of the building.

Baylor’s George W. Truett Theological Seminary will open a new campus in Dallas beginning next academic year, the university announced this month. For Truett Seminary, it is the third expansion outside its central Waco campus in the last eight years, with the Houston location opening in 2018 and San Antonio in 2021.

It makes sense that internships feel uncomfortable. It’s because they are our first experiences building out our professional identities. We spend eight to 12 disorienting weeks trying on different hats, figuring out and deciding what we’ll want to be known for in the office. Do you want to be the outgoing leader? The quiet worker who excels in certain tasks? The Swiss Army knife? There are endless professional personas to choose from, and you’ve probably only considered this concept in the past three months. So it’s perfectly okay to feel a bit out of body for the summer. But don’t let it discourage or embarrass you.

In July, residents began moving into the newly renovated, nearly 80-year-old Kokernot Hall, which houses about 160 freshman women per year. From new bathrooms and common spaces to sidewalks and landscaping, the entire lot on the southwest corner of campus has been refreshed.

Baylor Baptist Student Ministry’s newly built, 12,000-square-foot facility opened Wednesday. The building sits on the corner of 4th Street and Daughtrey Avenue, on a plot Baylor donated before construction began last fall. Inside is a congregation hall, multiple meeting spaces, a prayer room, a seminar room, a hall of offices for BSM’s employees and a new location of For Keeps Coffee.

When ChatGPT’s release brought large language models to the forefront in 2022, it also sparked a flurry of private-sector breakthroughs. Bigger and better models and the introduction of AI agents have created a challenging disparity between newly relevant skills and what’s taught in the classroom.

Last year, two Baylor business students formed a nonprofit to collect dorm items during move-out and donate them to charities in need. Now after Bear-ly Used’s first year of operations, which donated over 13 storage pods worth of appliances, furniture and other goods, the team is back with bigger plans.

With nearly 120 years of combined experience in Penland Dining Hall, Elaine Battle, Linda Benson and Donna Majors have served thousands — maybe even millions — of meals to the Baylor community. But the three are known for far more than flipping omelets or making pizzas. Their careers are marked by countless relationships and acts of service that go beyond the women’s job descriptions.

As a freshman, I recall planning my weekends around dining hall hours, which, for an unlimited meal plan, seems rather limiting. Two years and one new food supplier later, Penland Hall is still the only spot that stays open past 9 p.m., and it happens only four nights a week. In that time, Baylor also closed Brooks Great Hall without meaningfully changing other facilities’ hours.

Just hours before the event was a final change: thousands of general admission tickets were voided to accommodate a Baylor-only policy that the university claims had always been in place.

Coordinated by Computing for Compassion, the Association of Computing Machinery and Baylor Cyber, the 24-hour Wacode Hackathon challenged contestants to develop software with a positive social impact and a solution to a real humanitarian problem, all in the time-constrained environment of a hackathon.

Since 1932, leaders in the Baylor community have hosted Diadeloso. As Dia 2026 entered the history books, numerous campus groups pat themselves on the back for facilitating a break from school and work for the estimated 2,500 in attendance.

A sprinkler system malfunction flooded the kitchen of Memorial Dining Hall Monday afternoon, closing the cafeteria for about two hours and forcing staff to throw out both hot and unprepared food.

As of Wednesday, Chief Investment Officer David Morehead said he expected the endowment to end the month near $2.5 billion, up from $2.4 billion at the end of September and a further increase from its $2.17 billion balance in May 2025. The endowment contributes 5% of its value back to Baylor each year, so each dollar the endowment makes puts five cents into Baylor’s operating budget.

Shobi Ahmed, the manager of the Exxon station where the Subway was housed, said the restaurant closed Feb. 1 after the lease was not renewed. The reason for Subway’s closure, he said, was slowing business caused by changing landscapes around campus dining. While the company Ahmed works for has managed the property for only about a year, Ahmed said he was told the Subway was busier in the past when students could use their IDs to pay for food.

Baylor students are sandwiched between two factors that compress the value of their education. On one side, a tightening job market is bringing prospects for young graduates back down to COVID-19 lows. On the other side, disproportionate price increases in the already fast-growing industry of higher education continue to push the cost of a degree toward hard-to-believe figures.

Jim Jaska has been the mayor of Ross, Texas, for 40 years. But in four decades at the helm of the 250-person community just north of Waco, he’s never seen a situation like this: plans for a $10 billion data center are underway right in the little town’s backyard, threatening its rural identity — and he wasn’t told anything about it.

The 2.25-mile Bear Trail around campus is mostly concrete, but three-fourths of a mile between the Dutton Garage and the intersection of Second Street and Bagby Avenue is a softer decomposed granite surface that narrows to just a few feet in some spots. Construction Project Manager AJ Mueller said that about two-thirds of that stretch is currently being upgraded to an 8-foot-wide concrete sidewalk, while the remaining third near Dutton Garage is tentatively scheduled for the same work.