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Catarina DeMatos’ experience with Facebook started with a surprise in the fall of 2018. 

She walked into her CS 114 class and learned her instructor was Miki Friedmann, a Facebook software engineer and a visiting faculty member at NJIT’s Ying Wu College of Computing.

They headed out at 8 a.m. on a Friday in September for a whirlwind excursion of Manhattan-based startups, accelerators, incubators and venture capital firms. And after traversing the city, between midtown and downtown, they returned to NJIT at day’s end with a firsthand view and better understanding of the world of entrepreneurship.

It was a timely inspiration that garnered two Honors College students a first-place hackathon win.

Stop in any Starbucks or McDonalds and you’ll see the signs by the credit card reader: Google Pay accepted here, Apple Pay accepted, or tap to pay. 

Visit a vendor at a farmers market and you’ll find many accept credit or debit cards using an attachment on their smartphone from Square or Clover.

NJIT students had a chance to connect with tech powerhouses Facebook, Google and Microsoft during information sessions held on campus. Sessions included tech challenges, puzzle competitions, panel discussions and résumé workshops.

There were no digital computers at NJIT, known as Newark College of Engineering, in 1960.

This was not a unique situation. Most computers in 1960 were room-sized beasts performing logic through vacuum tubes. A few companies made smaller machines, when small was a relative term meaning something about the size of a Mini Cooper.

Students wishing to understand the chaos of national politics might listen to Cody Buntain, a new assistant professor in the Ying Wu College of Computing informatics department, who said it succinctly: "Look away from the phone."

Buntain joined NJIT this year to teach computer ethics and to research how computing systems can be built more resilient against misinformation campaigns.

According to NJIT Career Development Services’ most recent annual report, almost one-fifth of undergrads from the Class of 2018 who reported full-time employment indicated an NJIT career fair as their source.

That figure certainly demonstrates the value of students attending the fair, to both mingle with prospective employers and leave a lasting impression on recruiters. But vital to the mix in landing a position is preparedness.

NJIT researchers received an $849,024 National Science Foundation grant to help invent ways of taming the wilderness that is online content moderation.

Anyone who interacts in online communities knows the pain, whether you commented on an article, calmed down friends arguing with each other on your Facebook wall, made a tough Yelp review or got censored by a forum manager. "Never read the comments" is a mantra of news writers in the 21st century, although we all secretly do.

NJIT @JerseyCity welcomed its first students on September 3, 2019.

With the start of the fall semester, dozens of students embarked on graduate-level academic programs in data science at NJIT’s new location, just steps from the Exchange Place PATH station in the Waterfront district of Jersey City.