Coordinates: 31°46′12″N 106°30′18″W / 31.77°N 106.505°W / 31.77; -106.505

The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) is a four-year state university, and is a component institution of the University of Texas System. Its campus is located on the bank of the Rio Grande in El Paso, Texas. The school was founded in 1914 as The Texas State School of Mines and Metallurgy, and a mineshaft still exists on the mountainous, desert campus. It became Texas Western College in 1949, and The University of Texas El Paso in 1967. In Fall 2011, enrollment was 22,640.

UTEP is the largest university in the U.S. with a majority Mexican-American student population (about 75%). It is the only such university to be classified RU/H ("Research Universities (high research activity)") by the Carnegie Foundation.

Other notable features of UTEP are its campus architecture (modeled after the dzong style of Bhutan), and its athletic history (UTEP was the first college in the American South to integrate its intercollegiate sports programs).

Barack Hussein Obama II (ⁱ/bəˈrɑːk huːˈseɪn oʊˈbɑːmə/; born August 4, 1961) is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. In January 2005, Obama was sworn in as a U.S. Senator in the state of Illinois. He would hold this office until November 2008, when he resigned following his victory in the 2008 presidential election.

Born in Honolulu, Hawaii, Obama is a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he was the president of the Harvard Law Review. He was a community organizer in Chicago before earning his law degree. He worked as a civil rights attorney in Chicago and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004. He served three terms representing the 13th District in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004.

Following an unsuccessful bid against the Democratic incumbent for a seat in the United States House of Representatives in 2000, Obama ran for the United States Senate in 2004. Several events brought him to national attention during the campaign, including his victory in the March 2004 Illinois Democratic primary for the Senate election and his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in July 2004. He won election to the U.S. Senate in Illinois in November 2004. His presidential campaign began in February 2007, and after a close campaign in the 2008 Democratic Party presidential primaries against Hillary Rodham Clinton, he won his party's nomination. In the 2008 presidential election, he defeated Republican nominee John McCain, and was inaugurated as president on January 20, 2009. Nine months later, Obama was named the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize laureate. In April 2011, he announced that he would be running for re-election in 2012.