Daily Bull 3.7.17: Texas A&M is headed to SXSW

HOWDY. Well not much going on these days so here’s a deep dive on a single news item: Texas A&M University is gonna be repping hard at this year’s South By Southwest in Austin next week.

Interactive Week. It sounds fancy and exciting and a little bit daunting. (Maybe for others, but you and I do it every week, obviously.) So what’s the main end game here?

Amy Smith, senior vice president, chief marketing and communications officer at A&M, said she hopes the university can take advantage of the festival's global attention to share with the world the work being done at Texas A&M.

Sounds pretty cool. A&M has grown exponentially in the past quarter century, and this is a nice chance to continue to showcase the innovative side of the university and help remind people it’s not just a country ag school anymore. (But it’s still also that, which is great!)

Let’s tick some boxes and see what’s on the agenda:

“The panels, presentations and exhibits to be featured by the university during the festival will cover such topics as”

• exploring the impact emotions and emotional reactions have on decision-making,

Good God. Just pull up some archived Aggie Twitter feeds from any big sporting event from the past five years.

• how "big data" can be used for research and discovery,

Example: when TexAgs users conduct their highly-scientific polls that they think represents a wide swath of society but in reality only serve to reinforce their extremely insular worldview.

• a chemistry road show

Photo by Stephen Shugerman/Getty Images

• and more.

Including, but not limited to: Virtual Athletic Directing in the Modern Digital Age, Proper Depiction of Sheer Angst Using Emoji, The Scientific Formulation of Recruiting Rankings, Tailgating and WiFi Synergy, and more.

Rodney Boehm, director of Aggies Invent and engineering professor of practice, said in addition to the events being put on by the university, 12 A&M students are set to participate in the "Texas A&M Invents for an Intelligent Future" competition.

Folks, this is so on-brand that Chet Norsworth shed an actual natural tear in a rare display of human emotion.

We'll be able to stand out [in the interactive week]," Smith said. "We won't be there during the education week where we would be talking to each other with other universities, we're going to be talking to the Fortune 500 companies that are going to be participating in the interactive. ... We want to be able to message to them about who we are and what we do."

See that? Fortune 500? WE’RE GUNNING FOR YOU, HARVARD, PRINCETON, YALE, AND CORNELL.

Good luck to the team, and don’t forget to have fun. Gig ‘Em.