NJIT to Make a Splash With Community Outreach Event
Hundreds of high school students from Newark and around the state will visit New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) March 24 for NJIT Splash, a one-day enrichment program taught by NJIT students. The program, which debuted at NJIT last year and continues as an annual event, will run from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. and is open to students in grades nine through 12.
Inspired by the Educational Studies Program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, NJIT Splash aims to get high schoolers excited about learning and going to college. Toward this end, the day will feature both academic and nonacademic classes as well as collaborative and hands-on projects focused primarily on engineering, science, math and computer science, the humanities and the arts. Students will be able to register for and take part in a range of fun and challenging courses, from 3D papermodeling, painting and poetry, to game development, data science and R programming, to astrophysics and biomedical engineering. Chess, bucket gardening and creating PowerPoint presentations are among the walk-in offerings.
“NJIT Splash was created by students for students and the mini-courses show the broad range of talents, training and the creativity of our students,” said Louis Hamilton, dean of NJIT’s Albert Dorman Honors College, which oversees the event. “High schools come from all over New Jersey to attend and leave with a new sense of intellectual curiosity and desire for learning. I am really looking forward to it.”
To ensure that students from the Newark community take advantage of NJIT Splash, the program’s advisers hand-delivered course catalogs and flyers to guidance counselors at Science, Newark Tech, Arts, Bard, People’s Prep, North Star and St. Benedict’s Prep high schools. Other schools received formal email invitations and reminders.
Organizing NJIT Splash this year are Dorman Scholars Maryam Elhadad, a senior studying human-computer interaction; Anne Marie Lim, a sophomore majoring in mechanical engineering; Taylor Tu, a senior studying computer science and math; and Daniel Wang, a sophomore pursuing a degree in biology (accelerated pre-med).
“Splash helps create a bridge between NJIT and our neighboring communities and helps us, as college students, to pass our passion for learning onto the younger generation in our community. It also shows NJIT students that community service can be fun and engaging,” remarked Tu, the event’s lead student. “Furthermore, Splash exposes high schoolers to a college environment which, paired with an interest for learning, will hopefully encourage them to pursue higher education.”
The cost for Splash is $10 (payable by credit card, or by cash/check upon check-in) and includes lunch. To register, visit njitsplash.learningu.org.
A complete list of courses can be found at https://njitsplash.learningu.org/learn/Splash/Spring_18/catalog.
