Walking through NJIT’s green spaces and residence hall courtyards Labor Day week, it’s not uncommon to hear pockets of conversation burst to life among the campus’s bright-eyed freshman newcomers, often of the different roads they’ve traveled to begin their collegiate journeys here at the start of the fall semester. Among them is Julia Lizik. A four-hour drive up I-95 with her mother from their home in Frederick, Maryland, was Lizik’s road to NJIT, though the reasons behind her arrival are part of a rather new academic experience at the university.

Payscale has released its 2019 College Salary Report and New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) has placed #53 out of over 4,000 colleges and universities across the U.S. in the mid-career salary rankings. In addition, NJIT is #1 for state schools in mid-career salary.

Finding Keith Williams in a classroom isn’t unusual. He’s taught at NJIT for years, but this summer he taught somewhere quite different. Williams traveled more than 7,400 miles to teach at ZCAS University in Zambia, invited by the Zambian government to teach a course on mobile technology and set up a degree program to help students develop software solutions.

Remora fishes are famed hitchhikers of the marine world, possessing high-powered suction disks on the back of their head for attaching themselves in torpedo-like fashion to larger hosts that can provide food and safety — from whales and sharks to boats and divers.

After a restful summer break, students new to and returning to New Jersey Institute of Technology are encouraged to take part in Welcome Week during their first week of school. The events are open to all students and there is no registration necessary. Here are a few events to look forward to: Pancakes with the President — Tuesday, Sept. 3, 8-10 a.m., Campus Center West Plaza

Come this fall semester, NJIT will welcome 1,375 freshmen to campus, an increase of 6% over last year and a university record to boot. NJIT also realized a record in the total number of freshman applications received, up 11% as compared to 2018, with 9,047 students seeking enrollment at the university. Other best-ever figures include this year’s freshman class average SAT score of 1297 and average GPA of 3.60. Thirty-one percent of the students ranked in the top 10% of their high school class, 10 were valedictorians and 6 were salutatorians.

Students returning to New Jersey Institute of Technology this fall will notice a flurry of enhancements across campus. From the finishing touches to the Wellness and Events Center to an expansion of the Makerspace at NJIT, the campus continues to improve and expand to meet the needs of students, faculty and staff.

Kurt Rohloff, a professor of computer science at NJIT’s Ying Wu College of Computing, has been awarded the prestigious DARPA Director’s Fellowship from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

Vincent Naimoli, a 1962 graduate of the Newark College of Engineering (now New Jersey Institute of Technology) and namesake of the Naimoli Family Athletic and Recreational Facility, has died. He was 81.

A five-woman team of undergraduate engineering students is tackling a problem experienced by a diverse and growing population: balance instability. For the elderly, people recovering from strokes and accidents or those living with disorders that affect movement, such as Parkinson’s disease, falls present the risk of grave injury. With funding from the Hearst Foundations, the team is taking aim at the mechanics that lie at the heart of the problem, determining with precision – and on a step-by-step basis – when, where and how an individual loses stability.