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As emergency response teams in the region scramble to acquire dwindling medical supplies to combat the surge in COVID-19 (coronavirus) infections, diverse members of the NJIT community – from engineers to physicists to advanced manufacturing specialists to students – are designing and fabricating devices to help address the shortfall.

From traditional classroom learning and accelerated programs to online and hybrid (combining online and face-to-face) instruction, graduate students at NJIT have a variety of options to earn advanced degrees. They also have a lot of choice, with 50+ master’s programs (including 15 fully online), 19 doctoral programs and 40 certificate programs representing an array of STEM disciplines.

For its unwavering and ongoing commitment to both first-generation college students and students from traditionally underrepresented backgrounds, NJIT has been acknowledged in four key areas of distinction: inclusion, affordability, completion and outcomes. The accolade comes from Strive for College, an online mentoring platform that supports aspiring college students and with which NJIT is a success partner.

After a table saw severed the top of his right index finger, Adam Zanellato, a 20-year-old cabinet-maker at the time, had to relearn basic hand maneuvers, such as how to write and hold a fork. There were no affordable prosthetics on the market to help him regain dexterity. Several years later, he still found it hard to pick up coins from a table.

They represent a sizable segment of NJIT’s student population — about a quarter — and come from around the country and the world to attend the university and acquire advanced skills to secure successful professional careers. Indeed, graduate students are pursuing degrees in a range of academic disciplines through a variety of instructional formats, from traditional classroom or face-to-face learning, to online and hybrid (combines online and face-to-face) learning.

U.S. News & World Report has released its 2021 rankings for the nation’s top graduate schools, with NJIT ranked among the best for graduate degree programs in engineering. The university moved up two slots this year to No. 87 — up 24 slots in the past five years — and has been included on the distinguished list since 2003.

NJIT's robotics club just stamped its ticket to the world championships tournament of a top-level league, despite competing as underdogs this season after all of its top members graduated last year.

Chief engineer Yichao Zhang and lead programmer Dale Nacianceno — the former a senior, the latter a freshman — are leading the Highlanders to Louisville, Ky. to play in a tournament comprising up to 92 teams, after qualifying with a victory at a College of Southern Maryland tournament in February.

By the end of this month, Rukayat Balogun will be working at Facebook as a site logistics analyst, overseeing staff that maintain the servers and the facility, and ensuring compliance with industry standards. She will be located just outside of Atlanta for this new position, which came her way last fall when a fellow student in NJIT’s Educational Opportunity Program (EOP) introduced Balogun to a visiting Facebook recruiter. The company flew her down south for what turned out to be a series of video interviews, followed by a bit of a wait.

At the American Institute of Chemical Engineering’s (AIChE) inaugural ChemEsports Competition in Orlando last November, Alexander Olowniuk’s eyes were fixed on the bubbling chemicals in his team’s distillation tower, a cylindrical vessel used in plants to separate volatile liquids into their pure forms at high heat.  

Choose New Jersey, a nonprofit organization advocating for business investments in the Garden State, included an NJIT representative in its delegation visit to Israel this month.