In building upon its deep and close relationship with the city in which it resides, New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) is partnering with the City of Newark and the Newark Public Schools on two new and important initiatives. NJIT President Joel S. Bloom, Newark Mayor Ras J. Baraka and Newark Board of Education Superintendent Roger León announced The Mayor’s Honors Scholars Program and the NJIT/Newark Math Success Initiative (MSI) at a news conference, held Feb. 27 at Newark City Hall.

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.

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.