I’m a current SMU student and I can honestly say that SMU has been a great experience. In job interviews I am directly competing with UT Austin students and some Texas A &m students (mostly honors). I beat out a few of them as an average finance student. I have plenty of friends that got into both and came to SMU for the opportunity of smaller class sizes and more leadership opportunities. That being said both UT Austin and SMU are great choices - be weary of the highly opinionated on this board, check out both schools (if possible on admitted student days).
I will recognize that in the listed fields of telecom, engineering, and software development SMU is improving, but most of the significant improvement of graduates was over the last 10 years (none of which would be at a peer level of managerial experience of the above poster). Also surprising Texas a&m, texas tech, texas state, trinity, baylor and tcu were unlisted for where they would send a child in state all good options with more rigor than utd.
In business, sciences, humanities, and the arts SMU students have excelled for quite a long time, engineering we are catching up in and excellent financial support is being appropriated toward strengthening the engineering programs. Also check out the common data sets of both here are links easy to see some of the differences and similarities. SMU is 62% out of state for the most recent entering class and about 8% international (very typical). So about 30% of a class from all around Texas.
https://www.smu.edu/Provost/IR/Statistics/CommonDataSets/2017
https://utexas.app.box.com/v/CDS2017
Any way its been a great four years, but make sure your parents are on board. If you have questions ill try and get to them - but also feel free to reach out to specific program heads and such for their take! Pony up!