UCF’s Next Mission

At UCF, the future isn’t just imagined. It’s built.

When NASA needed more experts to accelerate space travel, we created a university to train its future workforce.

When the College Football Playoff invited only certain teams to compete for the national championship title, we changed the rules.

When children needed more affordable prosthetics to grow with them, we engineered individualized bionic limbs.

And now, with your help, the university’s most ambitious campaign ever — Go For Launch — will generate $3.5 billion to boost even more creators, doers and innovators.

Here’s how we’ve already started.

Elevating Student Success

Mission: Bring tomorrow within reach for every Knight through scholarships, emergency funding and innovative support services.

Berline Civil is charting a course she once thought impossible.

A first-generation college student, she used the Burnett Honors College’s Inspire Scholarship as her launchpad — allowing her to attend UCF debt-free, study abroad in Spain and focus fully on discovery rather than day-to-day pressures.

Now a junior majoring in biomedical sciences, Civil is using the opportunities and support systems at UCF to define her own trajectory and uplift others in her orbit.

“The Inspire Scholarship allows me to focus on my classes without putting my family in debt, but it’s more than that,” says Civil, who plans to become a physician. “It’s allowed me to see a side of the world I never knew existed, and show my family and neighbors that life can be about more than just surviving.”

With the right systems in place, Go For Launch ensures more Knights like Civil can take flight and pursue a future once thought out of reach.

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Fueling Discovery and Innovation

Mission: Accelerate UCF’s role as a driver of breakthrough research and real-world solutions by recruiting visionary faculty and pioneering cutting-edge programs.

Professor Christo Pirinsky is helping shape the future of finance.

In 2018, UCF recruited him from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to pioneer something few universities had yet attempted: a program that blends finance, data science and emerging technologies to prepare students for an industry evolving at lightning speed.

Since arriving at UCF, Pirinsky has built Florida’s first master’s program in fintech — and one of the first in the nation.

Go For Launch empowers experts like him to create dynamic new programs, ensuring UCF remains a catalyst for innovation for years to come.

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Advancing Future Frontiers

Mission: Elevate UCF’s national standing by enhancing campus spaces, technology and today’s top student-athletes.

Kyle Coutray is exploring one of humanity’s final frontiers: the human brain.

While in high school, he witnessed a neighbor suffer a traumatic brain injury. That moment shaped his life’s mission: developing technologies that restore movement for people with neurological injuries.

Now pursuing UCF’s medicine-engineering double degree program, Courtray is conducting research inside some of the university’s most advanced research environments. In one lab, he helped develop a user-friendly platform for experimental neurorehabilitation. And in another lab, he led the development of an eye-tracking interface that translates subtle movements into digital control.

“I don’t just want to study the brain — I want to give people their lives back,” Coutray says.

By investing in cutting-edge labs and learning environments, Go For Launch makes it easier to turn aspirations into life-changing technologies.

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Building a Bolder Future

This campaign is unmistakably UCF, recognizing the full ecosystem of support that powers our growth — from philanthropy and transformational donor commitments to corporate partnerships, research commercialization, licensing and revenue-generating ventures.

At UCF, we know our future will be powered by partnerships, working side by side with industry, government and donors.

It’s what sets us apart: We dare to bring it all into orbit, collectively building a future the world has only begun to imagine.

This mission is fueled by your support. Invest in a bolder vision for tomorrow. Make a gift today.