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The purpose is twofold: “tap into the creative and forward-thinking minds of young people, and at the same time, encourage students to take a more active role in understanding and shaping health care.” Indeed, the second annual Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey (Horizon BCBSNJ) Health Care Transformation Challenge yielded new apps and devices designed by college students with their peers top of mind.

Every year, hundreds of high school and college students throughout the Garden State apply for the honor to be a Governor’s STEM Scholar. Slots are limited and the competition is steep.

New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) has reached out to giants in the field of cryptography nearly 7,000 miles away to advance blockchain, an evolving digital security technology designed to enable enterprises both large and small to expand transactions across borders, supply chains and diverse stakeholder groups.

In August, more than 700 teams comprised of statisticians, programmers, engineers and students from across North America applied to enter this year’s “2018 NBA Hackathon” — a data-driven competition to “build tools that solve important and challenging problems in the NBA.”

It was then that a team of three mathematics students from NJIT applied for and earned distinguished selection into the contest’s final 20-team field, scheduled to compete at the NBA headquarters in Secaucus, NJ this past fall.

Across campus, students clad in lime-green T-shirts gave out ribbons, stickers and brochures, and in the Central King Building, an important discussion open to the NJIT community was held. Both activities marked NJIT’s observance of World Mental Health Day, Oct. 10. They also represented the first public endeavor of Minds Matter, a new student organization at the university dedicated to raising awareness of and stopping the stigma surrounding mental health disorders.

On a Wednesday afternoon, in a handful of rooms along the second-floor corridor of Albert Dorman Honors College, NJIT students and alumni networked, albeit not in person. The five participating alumni appeared on screen via Webex from the West Coast for the college’s Virtual Silicon Valley Networking event, interacting with and answering questions from small groups of students that rotated from room to room every 15 minutes.

Every year, we go through the ritual of rounding up some of the newest members of our student body: astute first-year students, who are critical thinkers in pursuit of a dynamic intellectual environment and insightful instruction.

And every year, even as the average overall SAT score of our incoming class (1287) and undergraduate enrollment (1,296 freshmen selected out of 8,126 applications) continue to soar, we marvel at all the ways these gung-ho boundary-pushers descend on campus with a clear vision for their future, ready to take ownership of their education.

In the 1990s, Jack Kevorkian controversially brought the issue of physician-assisted dying to the forefront of a conversation at the crossroads of medicine, technology, law and morality — known as bioethics. 

New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) will host a TEDxNJIT event Nov. 8, 2018 in the Jim Wise Theatre on the NJIT campus and via an accompanying live simulcast available to viewers worldwide. The independently organized event, licensed by TED, is themed “ReFraming” and will feature leaders from business, academia and the arts addressing a range of topics.