Quoting Fred Rogers and poet Audre Lorde, NJIT alumna Gabrielle Rejouis urged members of the Class of 2024 to be helpers and foster communities during the university’s annual convocation, which was held online on Wed., Sep. 9, 2020.

 

Donald “Will” Andrews, NJIT’s first-ever recipient of the Humanity in Action Fellowship, attributes his selection for the distinguished summertime program to his choice of study at the university: industrial engineering.

“There probably weren’t that many engineers that applied … so that made my application stand out from the start — like, ‘hey, look, we have an engineer from Kentucky applying for this social sciences fellowship in Europe,’” said Andrews laughingly.

Exploring remote, exotic locations is a long-standing tradition among college students. For applied physics major Samantha Lomuscio ’20, that destination during her senior year has been Jupiter, nearly 390 million miles away.

Working with astrophysicists at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), where she began conducting high-energy astrophysics research last summer, her goal has been to detect the solar system’s largest planet in a way that has never been done successfully — through gamma-ray emissions.

Each spring around Commencement, NJIT’s College of Science and Liberal Arts holds its very own celebration, awarding its standout student and faculty stars from across the college’s diverse academic spectrum of art, history and humanities to physics, biology and chemistry.

As a kid growing up in Omaha, Neb., Chloe Jelley ’20 had a major aversion to insects that many can relate with.

“I was one of the more careful kids and I was not into bugs at all when I was young … actually, I was really afraid of all bugs,” recalled Jelley.

For the students behind The CommonHealth Project — a collaborative, community-based initiative aimed at rallying volunteers for production and distribution of urgently needed personal protective equipment (PPE) — the pandemic is deeply personal. Mark Pothen ’22, a mechanical engineering major at NJIT, for example, hears stories from his mother, a physician working on the front line at Mountainside Hospital.

Even in the social distancing era, the show must go on for the art world. That includes the NJIT/Rutgers-Newark theatre arts community, which is soon returning to its audiences with a string of all-new virtual performances exploring art, click-based technology and social connections during physical isolation. 

Volunteerism continues to be part of the foundation of NJIT. In 2019 alone, the university’s students contributed more than 67,000 hours of community service and gave their time to over 300 community-based organizations.

NJIT undergrads continue to earn the nation’s top academic honors, the latest being a new university record of four students named Goldwater Scholars this year by the Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation. The scholarship is recognized among the country’s most prestigious for STEM undergraduates pursuing research careers.

“It’s a little bittersweet to have to leave without being able to say proper goodbyes to everyone,” lamented Sravya Vegunta, a senior Albert Dorman Honors College (ADHC) scholar, about graduating from NJIT during the coronavirus pandemic.

“But I’m definitely glad to be moving on to that next stage, because it’s something that I’ve been looking forward to for so long,” she added, speaking from her Monroe Township home where she is staying inside with her parents and younger brother.