03/25/2025
By Katharine Webster

For the first time in its history, UMass Lowell’s Mock Trial team is going to compete in the Mock Trial National Championship Tournament.

David Levenson, a senior honors psychology major and president of the Doctor Francis T. Talty ’77 Pre-Law Society and the Mock Trial team, says that he used to think competing beyond the regional level was a dream reserved for students at private universities.

Not anymore.

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UMass Lowell’s Mock Trial team was undefeated at its regional tournament in Boston in February, and earlier this month, it placed among the top six teams at the championship qualifying tournament in New Rochelle, New York. That earned the team a spot at the national tournament, which will be held in Cleveland, Ohio, on the weekend of April 4-6. Follow UMass Lowell (UML) Mock Trial on Instagram.

“Over the past couple of years, it’s gone from being a distant imagining – we could never make it that far – to becoming a reality,” Levenson says.

Mock Trial is just one of four student-run teams that keep on winning – and striving to achieve at higher and higher levels.

A UML team took home first place at the Northeast Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition in mid-March, winning a bid to the national tournament next month. A student investment club beat out the three other universities in the UMass system to win the UMass Foundation’s annual Student Managed Fund competition. And UML’s Model United Nations (U.N.) team just returned from a conference in Copenhagen with several awards.

How do they do it? Levenson and other student leaders say their teams celebrate each member’s accomplishments and inspire each other to work hard.

For the 10 students rostered to compete in the national championship for Mock Trial, that meant starting to learn a brand-new, fictional legal case even before the bus ride home from New Rochelle.

“Ten minutes after we qualified for nationals, we were reading the new case,” Levenson says. “We never get complacent.”

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Corey Perez, a senior business major with concentrations in finance and accounting, says that kind of drive also motivated the finance students who won the UMass Foundation’s annual Student Managed Fund competition.

“Our win is a testament to the rigorous, value-driven approach we’ve refined over the past year,” Perez says. “It reflects classroom collaboration, deep dives into market trends and a commitment to long-term investing principles inspired by the likes of Warren Buffett.”

The UMass Lowell group’s portfolio for fiscal 2024 outperformed those of teams from UMass Amherst, Boston and Dartmouth. The winner each year is determined based on its portfolio’s return compared to the S&P 500.

All of the students who competed took Professor Ravi Jain’s Student Managed Fund class. They were recognized at the Student Managed Fund luncheon, held recently at the UMass Club in Boston. The team also received a $5,000 prize, which will go back into its investment portfolio.

Since receiving an initial $25,000 seed investment from the UMass Foundation 18 years ago, the UML fund has grown to more than $300,000. System-wide, the student-managed investment portfolio has grown to more than $1.7 million.

UMass President Marty Meehan ’78 and Robert Manning ’84, ’11 (H), chair of the UMass Foundation’s board of directors, congratulated the students at the luncheon. The foundation is a nonprofit that professionally manages donor investments.

“These students are building skills and making connections that deepen their educational experience and can help accelerate their careers,” Manning said. 

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Jason Carter '04, '06, '21, who advises the Dean Bergeron International Relations Club and its Model U.N. team and teaches an international relations class many team members take, says that's the philosophy underlying Model U.N. as well. He’s most proud of the students who learn new skills and gain confidence, whether in public speaking or research, he says.

“I don’t measure their success by the number of awards they win … because it’s always subjective,” he says.

Still, the team and its members consistently win awards at national and international conferences. After winning the award for best delegation in Scotland last year, they decided to challenge themselves by trying a new conference in Copenhagen this year.

The conference, hosted by Copenhagen Business School, only gave out individual awards. Graduate student Madison Feudo ’24 won a best delegate award for representing Saudi Arabia on the special World Bank committee, and seven more UML students received honorable mentions.

Feudo, who is in the Peace and Conflict Studies master’s degree program, says that while it’s nice to win, she loves Model U.N. because of the community and because “there’s always something new to learn.” She, too, cited the group’s work ethic.

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“We don’t want to just go to Copenhagen and be done. We want to go above and beyond,” she says.

Model U.N. is hosting its annual high school conference this week and heads off to a Model Arab League competition in Washington, D.C., in early April.

On the same weekend that Mock Trial will compete in Cleveland, computer science students will be fighting off a massive cyberattack in the National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition.

The annual contest challenges students to defend a simulated corporate network from cyberattacks. The UML team – eight rostered players and four alternates – defeated teams from 10 universities and colleges in the northeast regional competition in mid-March to advance.

The competition is held virtually, so the UML team will compete from the university’s Cyber Range, a dedicated space with networked computers that are shielded from the internet so that students and faculty can create or recreate cyberattacks as well as learn how to defend against them.