Going Viral: The Top 10 NJIT Stories of 2017
It’s been a busy semester.
It’s possible you missed some of our trending stories.
Don’t fret! You can play catch up.
Following are the Top 10 most-read, viewed and shared NJIT stories of 2017.
Several of our readers’ favorites were about student success, campus improvements and groundbreaking research.
1. NJIT Ranked No. 1 Among American Working Class Colleges
This article written by New York Times Op-Ed columnist and associate editorial page editor, David Leonhardt, helped us kick off 2017 in grand fashion when he cited NJIT as the No. 1 college in the nation for upward mobility. Read more…
2. NJIT Grad Students Invent Slick New Dating App
Just in time for Valentine’s Day, this story about a mobile dating app that matches people based on their facial features, created by four graduate computer science students, under the direction of Ying Wu College of Computing’s Professor Cristian Borcea, went viral. Packaged with the most viewed NJIT video of 2017, this piece was the No. 1 non-ranking story of the year, and was the subject of a cover story for the New Jersey section of The Star-Ledger. It was also picked up by a ton of other print, digital and video outlets, such as FIOS1 TV, Fox News, The Verge — and even landed on a segment of “Good Morning America.” Read more…
3. How an Industrial Design Course Helped an Engineering Student Land an Internship at NASA
We love to celebrate the academic and professional achievements of our Highlanders; student success-themed stories are among our most read pieces. So it’s fitting that the No. 1 story of the fall semester detailed how Monica Torralba’s ’18 decision to do something a little unconventional to fulfill her chemical engineering degree requirement led to the internship of a lifetime at NASA. This piece also demonstrates that by “branching out of a specific major’s required course load, students are able to leverage not just knowledge from a different field, but new faculty and student perspectives as well,” said Assistant Professor Mathew Schwartz. Read more…
4. Career Advice Straight from Employers
NJIT is a job placement juggernaut. It’s no wonder MONEY Magazine named us one of the Top 10 colleges in the nation with great career services. But navigating a career fair beside 2,500 other highly qualified jobseekers can be intimidating. In this tip-driven roundup, Staff Writer Julie Jacobs probed recruiters and hiring managers for advice and pointers on how Highlanders can make a great first impression. Read more…
5. NJIT Grad Nets Big Win with Table Tennis Team
The basketball and soccer teams seem to get all the love. But this story about Vivek Kanakamedala, an engineering management graduate student, who led NJIT’s table tennis team to the National Collegiate Table Tennis Association’s NYC Uptown divisional tournament – where they beat reigning champion Princeton University and two-time champion Columbia University – was not only our most popular athletics-themed piece of the year, it also ranked as our most popular post on Facebook. Read more…
6. A More Than 100 Percent Quantum Step Toward Producing Hydrogen Fuel
This piece on the investigative work into hydrogen fuel production conducted by Assistant Professor Yong Yan in the Department of Chemistry and Environmental Science was one of our most viewed science stories of the year, according to EurekAlert!. Yan wrote about his advances in the journal Nature Energy. Read more…
Moments before members of the Class of 2017 were conferred their hard-earned degrees at the 2017 commencement ceremony, biology student Sina Nassim sent an already exuberant crowd into overdrive when he got down on one knee to propose to his girlfriend. Watch here…
8. An NJIT Researcher Throws a Global Ham Radio 'Party' to Study the Eclipse
While millions of people prepared to hit the streets last summer to watch the moon pass between the Sun and Earth, Senior Writer Tracey Regan profiled Assistant Research Professor Nathaniel Frissell, who used radio transmissions to identify how much of the ionosphere was impacted by the eclipse. This celestial performance made for one of our most popular research stories of the year, gaining placement on NJ.com, Phys.org, ScienMag.com, Medium.com and PBS Newshour. Read more…
Who doesn’t love food? We sure do! But all college food isn’t created equal. This piece goes behind the scenes of Gourmet Dining Services’ tireless efforts to meet the gastronomic needs and whet the appetites of NJIT’s diverse student body. Warning: Watching the video that accompanies this foodie article may cause extreme hunger! Read more…
One of the top 10 stories of the fall semester was this recap of the numerous renovation and construction projects happening on campus. Amid a flurry of ribbon-cuttings, new landscape designs and revamped spaces was the opening of the Wellness and Events Center, the centerpiece of NJIT’s $300 million campus facelift. Read more…